FlyBono24

If people say it's so hard and all this crap, why do cheap little $15k cars like the Ford Focus have stuff like Bluetooth and native iPod controls and all these other technologies that have been mainstream for like 5-6 years already?

I'm not saying that it takes any fun out of driving the car, but it is really annoying to have to switch CD's in and out when it would be a helluva lot easier just to plug in your iPod, select your playlist, and not have to touch the radio controls for WEEKS straight as you listen to your digital music.

This is something you should EXPECT on a $50k+ car.

NevadaVette

hulksdaddy is correct. Hooking up an IPOD is a very difficult assignment for GM and the current hold up is in their legal department.

The GM corporate mouthpiece wants to make sure that plugging in an IPOD in a Corvette sets off a nag screen that won't let you use your IPOD until you read a multi-syllabic "I AGREE" safety screen and then push some buttons to assure your vehicle that you have read it every time you want to listen to something on your IPOD, just like the corporate pinheads came up with for their $2,000 Navigation System.

After a comprehensive legal review, the official legal language will be shipped to GM Tijuana for further review and translation into Spanish, so you can push some more buttons and make sure that you have a multi-lingual understanding of the official IPOD safety warning available at all times.

The IPOD PAL engineers have been temporarily reassigned to again reformulating roof glue, this time for the ZR1 carbon fiber roof, so that they can come up with a new glue formula that is cheaper than they now use on the anti-fly-off-and-kill-a-pedestrian painted roofs.

Be grateful that GM is so concerned with the safety of your IPOD. All in all, second quarter seems to be a little agressive. Don't be surprised if the IPOD itself becomes as obsolete as an 8-Track by the time the corporate bureacrats at GM figure it all out.

Smith13

Does this work very well?

http://www.coastaletech.com/CORVETTEIPOD.htm

Dvlray6

It isn't a matter of drivability. It is a matter of being unable to implement a simple option that most/all of the others do as a matter of course. It also happens to be an option that many under age 60 seem to desire. You either give the customers what they want - or they may go someplace else. Attacking the customer rarely provides positive results.

NevadaVette

That's a nice story about GM. Too bad that it is a lie.

GM announced that the IPOD PAL would be available to customers with Navigation radios on or about the same time that they announced that the same connection would be made available as standard equipment to owners of Corvettes equipped with a certain non-navigation radio. GM subsequentlly went on to charge certain customers who relied upon that representation (or misrepresentation, as the case may be) and purchased Corvettes from them some $2,000 for their navigation radio.

To date there is no such IPOD PAL available, just a litany of stories that it may be available if and when GM ever gets around to it.

A reputable business doesn't take money from customers and not do what it agreed to do in a reasonable fashion. No customer should have to "DEMAND" that and no reputable business should need an "incentive" beyond that.

talon90

When we bought the car it didn't have an mp3 capability. Whether or not it should have is a different matter all together. I too want the PAL to be finished very badly. What I've done however is burned most of my mp3 collection to CDR and play them in my mp3 equipped nav head unit. I've gotten on with my life.

Cool Rod

I have one of these, which I bought after giving up on the GM PAL.

It's a mixed bag really. It does what it says it does, but it doesn't shuffle. Without that you end up playing everything in the same sequence time after time, which gets old. If you want to go through your whole library it will take a very long time and it will just play in order. You can skip forward or backward, but it's more trouble than it's worth. It will play your playlists, so you need to put your music into manageable playlists and then search from playlist to playlist.

All in all, it's OK, but it's not a real iPOD controller because it limits what you can do.

Drop-dead-simple installation.

It has a jack built in so you can plug your iPOD into it with an RCA to RCA cable, then choose "AUX" on your nav screen. If you do that you can set up your iPOD for shuffle play and everything will play randomly. You can use the other controls manually too. It doesn't identify song names or artists in AUX mode, but that's not very important. The steering wheel controls wont work, except for volume. It doesn't charge in AUX mode though, so you will need a car charger to keep the iPOD going on long drives. That's about the best way to go.

The company itself seems a little quirky. They're hard to get in contact with. They don't respond to emails as far as I can tell, and voice messages don't seem any better. You might get a response eventually.

Mine has never given me any trouble, I did the work around so it plays randomly, it's clear sounding, so no real complaints, but I sure hope the GM PAL is more robust.

Maybe a 6 out of 10 but I don't know of anything better.

cthusker

Not me... I'm done driving this pile of junk until Ipod is ready... take that GM........

VetteMark

Just wish the 6 disc changer read mp3 also!

LT1 Z51

PAL is being tossed, too many issues.

GM is instead starting to add USB ports to the radio face. 2009 Cobalt gets it first.

I have however heard that the 2008 Bluetooth functionality may be available to Navigation owners for earlier model years of the C6 via a dealer installed kit.

steppindown

You know I love ya' Paul, especially after your advice that go my paint problems fixed, but you've gotta give it up with the "let's be fair to GM" stuff at some point. You can buy a vehicles at 1/4 the price of the Vette with iPod integration.

We are willing to pay EXTRA to have it dealer installed, while biting our nails over whether or not someone will scratch our paint with their belt buckle while doing so.

SO CAN SOMEONE AT GM PLEASE MOVE US INTO THE 21ST CENTURY WITH THIS ISSUE!!

talon90

I guess I need to explain my position on things like this.

It's not a matter of me "being fair to GM" really. I've been in engineering of durable goods for over 20 years. In a past life I've been involved in the development of automotive sensors for a tier one supplier to GM for a few of those years and yes, some of the products went into the Corvette. I know first hand what is involved in the development and integration of these systems into an existing platform such as the Corvette. More importantly the testing that needs to take place to insure compliance at many levels.

Remember that the Corvette comm bus has been around way too long. Other GM products have completed development cycles and have advanced past the Corvette in many ways. Even the seemingly budget vehicles. It is a matter of timing and the Corvette time hadn't come.

Everyone always mentions price, no one ever mentions value or cost. The Corvette is a bargain priced car with near supercar performance for a budget price. Oh and those 1/4 of the price vehicles, what's their 0-60 time again? How do they do on the road course? The quarter mile? Citing the lower cost of other marques that all ready have the technology is almost meaningless. In most cases these cars are built in numbers that are at least 2:1 over the Corvette and in some cases 10:1. This gives tremendous leverage to the manufacturer. Now GM should be able to integrate the functionality of the blue tooth and the mp3 to the Nav. Something is preventing them from doing that. Aftermarket producers can always do this stuff first. They don't have nearly the requirements that they have to meet. They don't have nearly the testing and development cycle that the OEM has. They can let the end user sort out and test most things for them. Do a search on the Lockpic as one example. Lastly and most importantly, they can send their manufacturing of the unit off to the lowest bidder in China.

Let's look at numbers for a second. GM needs to make this unit affordable. For 2005-2008 there are 42,803 installed Nav units. To make this worthwhile they need to make this for a larger installed user base so they are spreading it out over 3 or 4 platforms. Insert problem. There are currently three different communications protocols across these platforms. So, it is not a one size fits all.

The Corvette design engineering and development team is not a full time project team. When outside of the development cycle they are working on other models and platforms.

It's fine to want. To allude that people bought the Corvette Nav just because GM mentioned an upcoming product....shame on them then.

What bothers me to the core however is when people with absolutely no idea what they are talking about start spouting off about how easy it should be to do, how little cost it should take to do it and the far worst is when folks just start name calling and calling the engineers "idiots or stupid".

I want to see the PAL introduced, badly. I didn't however buy my Corvette with the expectation of it being introduced. I didn't buy the Nav because GM promised me a PAL. I bought the Nav because I wanted the functionality of a navigation unit and the integration it offered in the Corvette.

So, that's sort of where I'm parked on this issue. If you haven't garnered from my posts I'm a hard core Corvette fan. I'm also a realist and someone with a little experience in these types of things.

LT1 Z51

Corvette uses the old Class II system. GMT-360, GMT-355, Y-Body, U-body and some W-bodies are all that is left that use this system in 2007+.

Most GM cars now use the GM LAN 11-bit or 29-bit system. The cars with Navigation (or have it as an option) use 29-bit and those without it as an option use 11-bit for the most part.

I am surprised GM has Bluetooth in 09 for the Class II network. No other Class II car is getting it but the Corvette.

Shrike6

I've been looking forward to the PAL from GM for some time. I got tired of waiting and bought the Scosche unit to hook up the Ipod. It does not work as advertised, allowing control of the Ipod through the Nav screen. Others have had the same problem, with the best results allowing very limited and kludgey control of some functions. I can use the Ipod controls, and it sounds good. It is pretty unsafe to try using it while driving, though.
I'd like to address the issue of what GM's problem is.
Remember, this nav unit/Bose stereo was designed and programmed to GM's specs. I don't want to bash the engineers, but these are the guys that wouldn't put controls on the steering wheel for gods sake. What excuse for that? From the long running thread on trying to hack the nav to allow entering destination info while moving, it's obvious the software was designed to make changes impossible. The $/performance ratio is unbeatable, true. But we're not talking much money if it was designed for upgrading as needed. Now, of course, it's a b**ch to retrofit.
I'd like to see it happen for real.
GM

BuckyThreadkiller

Any update on this issue? PAL was promised for the 07's and I'm hearing it won't be on 09's either.

Better to skip the stock system and do an after market head unit? AVIC or Kenwood to integrate BT, iPod, Back up cam and CD changer for the price of the stock Nav?

Gannet

Excellent reponse, and exactly right. It's not as easy in the real world as it is on the Internet.

Only 42k units out there? So if you had a penetration of 10%, which strikes me as reasonable (my guess is 70% of Vette owners never mod their cars - they are not on CF), that's only 4200 units. At a retail of $100 per, and assuming GM is grossing half that just to make the numbers easy, we're only looking at $210,000 and that has to cover all the engineering and all the manufacturing. Oh, let's be generous and round up to $300k. Putting that together with the technical problems already discussed, and no wonder there's no PAL. Heck, the wonder to me is that they ever even thought they would do it.

Would Apple have ever produced the iPod if they were only going to sell 4200 of them? And if they had, what would they cost?

BuckyThreadkiller

From a raw numbers standpoint it may not make sense but from a marketing standpoint its deadly.

1. To not offer an optional feature which is standard equipment on much of the competition is bad.

2. To promise and promote the feature two model years ago and still have not delivered is absurd.

3. For it to be perceived by the public as at simple cable connection that you can't seem to make work, makes GM look inept. (Obviously there's more to it, but perception is the consumer's reality)

4. It gives the overall impression that GM is not even close to mainstream consumer electronics, not a technologically adept company and doesn't care what their customers want.