If there’s one good thing about driving a $500 POS with no A/C and a driver’s door that doesn’t open, I guess it’d be that you can’t really make it much worse. Before the brakes blew out for the second time, I made a couple mods to my 1995 (??) Cutlass Supreme, aka The Stallion. Since the Cutlass was already an extremely high-performance machine, and that fact that I know next to nothing about auto mechanics, the upgrades were purely electronics related.
CarPlay
The first order of business was to hack in an aux input into the radio, which only had AM/FM. Back in 2009, a solid aux port was as good as gold. The photo above is pretty useless, but if you look closely, you’ll see a 2.5 mm jack and a big toggle switch used to go between radio and aux in. There’s something oddly satisfying about the ca-chunk of flipping that baby that you just can’t get with a touchscreen.
Automatic For The Headlights
Despite being a Supreme automobile, automatic headlights were not a stock feature, so I hacked some in myself. I used a photo resistor to sense the ambient light and switched the headlights on and off with a relay. There was a knob to adjust the threshold and another big ole toggle switch to bypass my handiwork; just in case things went haywire – which of course they did.
Keyless entry
Believe or not, this beauty didn’t come with keyless entry either. Sick of locking myself out, I spliced a hidden “security” button into the power door lock circuit and mounted it under the driver’s side door. If you knew where to look, you just had to press the button underneath to unlock the doors – no key required! Unfortunately, it didn’t fix the broken door, so I still had to crawl in through the passenger side about fifty percent of the time.
If you’re planning on going this route and completely circumventing your car’s security, I recommend picking up a weather-rated button. It turns out that months of winter road salt and slop isn’t the friendliest environment for cheapo switches from the surplus store. In my case, the whole thing would short out and blow the fuse every couple weeks, taking the power locks and interior lights down with it.
