Thread: 2003 Kia Optima stealth install

too bad 5% is illegal in most states

My windows are legal-limit tinted. Unfortunately, that's not very dark any more. So you can see right through them, even at night when there's a little light nearby.

Thanks, acebrooks44, I certainly like it. I jsut got back from vacation in the Smoky Mountains, and the carputer performed like a champ. We drove all around the mountains and never once wondered where we were or 'where does this road go?' Even an hour deep into the national park, where there's no hope for cell phone reception, the GPS only cut out in tunnels. We actually found a lot of great shortcuts around the thick traffic in Pigeon Forge. We were taking 2 minutes to get places that normally would have taken 10-15 minutes of waiting in traffic every other time we've gone there. Every time my kids got restless (especially while my wife was shopping in the outlet malls), I cranked up one of their DVD's and they quitened right down. This carputer really made vacation a much more enjoyable experience. And I've got a couple dozen GPS logs from Delorme that play back like a VCR on the map up to 50X the regular speed of driving them.

That's the spirit! It really amuses me how eager some people are to jump on me or others about the way we spend our hard-earned money. I have also looked at a lot of carputers over the years. I've seen a lot of things that I didn't like. But instead of bashing, I just made mental notes of what I did or didn't want to do.

I applaud everyone who undertakes a task like putting a computer in a car. It takes guts to tear into $2000 worth of computer parts and many thousands more worth of a car, just to go that extra step beyond the rest of the crowd.

The major auto makers should wake up and stop putting wimpy little navigation systems in their cars. Instead, build an open-architecture computer into their vehicles and let the consumer decide what software to run on it.