Swapping the Useless Factory Stereo in a 2017 Jeep Wrangler

The very first mod I did to my brand new 2017 Jeep Wrangler was to upgrade the terrible factory stereo. I swapped it for a 10.1″ Android touch screen system.

Before:

It’s 2017 and they still sell brand new vehicles with CD players?

After:

I bought a “Seicane” Android 7.1.2 head unit from seicane.com.

No, it wasn’t easy and several features don’t work as promised but overall it just about does everything it’s supposed to.

Over the coming days and weeks I’ll document as much as I can about what I learned so others may leverage my experiences.

It came in about a week from somewhere deep inside China which was impressive, albeit costly ($130 CAD for shipping).

Installation was supposed to be fairly simple (but wasn’t). The driver’s side factory dash comes off as one piece and is replaced with the two piece dash from Seicane. Getting the two piece to stay together was a nightmare.

Seicane provided a GPS antenna and I tried mounting it directly on top of the head unit but performance was poor. So I stuck it on top of the instrument cluster and under the dash.

Not sure what the factory puts here but it seemed like the perfect spot for the GPS antenna (red 3M tape).

I had to notch that out or the Seicane wouldn’t seat all the way down.

I also had to cut some of the tabs off the the bottom of the tray so it would fit flush with the rest of the unit (annoying).

Replacement tray doesn’t sit all the way down either without trimming.

Once that was all said and done it became apparent that Seicane didn’t put enough depth on the passenger side of the unit’s plastic frame. I measured it out and they definitely screwed it up. Others reported this problem too. It’s not that noticeable but does drive pixel-perfect-me nuts.

It probably only took 16 hours before I was satisfied that it wasn’t going to get any better.

Fitment aside, the sucker did boot right up on the first try!

Then I had to debug all the things that were supposed to work right out of the box but didn’t…

Left and right audio channels were swapped.
Subwoofer didn’t seem to be working.
A loud and annoying hum with the engine on.
Voice and call steering wheel buttons did not function.
Terrible GPS performance, Google Maps was unusable, even with the antenna on top of the instrument cluster.

What the hell? Here’s how I went about debugging them.