Hey guys n gals,

I recently installed a new aftermarket head unit. Kenwood. I have a 2007 Z51 3lt. 18K miles on the clock. Love the car!!! I have steering wheel controls for radio only. Question...If I were to change the steering wheel to a 2009 n up that has the full steering wheel controls, will it work for the blue tooth also?

Paul

 

Depends on the radio, and the steering wheel interface you use.

 

On the interfaces that I am familiar with, there is no special switch for year model of the vette. As long as it works with the current buttons, and the new buttons would work with the oem radio, then it should work with the interface and Kenwood radio.

 

So, I had a similar situation on my toyota. It didnt have the wireless phone buttons on the wheel. When I replaced the head unit, I added the phone controls to the wheel as well, and it all worked. I think the remote signal from the wheel somehow comes together and its all communicated to and interpreted by the head unit.
The Pac programming for my corvette makes me believe the same as well. You could press whatever button and make it do whatever you want it to do irrespective of the function on the wheel itself. If you only care about kicking siri off, or something like that, you might be able to use some of the buttons on the right side of the wheel too. I already had the phone controls on my corvette, so I cant be for sure how it will work for you on the corvette.

 

The newest PAC RP5-GM11 and the PAC GM1A-RST both have what's called short press and long press functionality where you can program two functions to one button depending on how long you hold the button, for example, on my phone answer button a short press will answer the phone if I get a call, if I press and hold the button (long press) it'll activate Siri in my head unit for voice commands, with mine I can have both short and long press functions on any of the buttons of my steering wheel. So what exactly are you referring to by you want something to work with "Bluetooth" also, what do you want to accomplish ? This is what the newest PAC RP5-GM11 interface looks like, if it doesn't look like this then it won't have the short/long press functions.




This is the old RP5-GM11 that DOESN'T have the short/long function.




This is the GM1A-RST that also has the short/long feature.



So there again you may have the ability to do this depending on the interface you have, one other question, does your current steering wheel have buttons on both sides of the steering wheel such as this one ? Or are they only on the right side ?




If yours only has the buttons on the right, then getting a newer steering wheel with the buttons on both sides, the buttons will all function, however as I noted above you might be limited on the functions you can program them to based on your interface. One other thing I had with mine, is that the phone buttons would always default to OnStar, so to get them to program they way I wanted was I had to disable OnStar, I did this by pulling the OnStar fuse in the fuse panel under the passenger side floor board which didn't bother me because OnStar is no longer supported on my car anyway, once disabled I was able to program the buttons anyway I wanted.