REVERSE ENGINEERING
I read the letter entitled ‘Reversing sensors’
(Help!, October 2017) with interest. I have installed a similar kit on several Vauxhall Corsas – a 12-plate, 14-plate and 17-plate. I chose a location for the sensor by looking at a factoryfitted system on a car in a car park.
With the 12- and 14-plate, I placed the control unit behind the plastic surround at the offside of the boot and connected a feed from the reversing light, putting a fuse in the feed. I fed the cables from the sensors to the control unit through the vents behind the bumper after protecting them against sharp corners. The cables did not cause problems with either the ventilation or road noise pick-up. The cable to the display was hidden behind the plastic trim on the driver’s side of the floor until I could run it up the trim on the inside of the A-post. The display was then mounted with double-sided tape.
The 17-plate had the new body style, so it was trickier to find a feed to the reversing light as Vauxhall had put the light on the hatch, which would have meant inserting a wire in the flexible rubber tube connecting the hatch to the body. In addition, Vauxhall had colour-coded all the wires in the hatch as black. After a bit of exploration, I located a connector behind the plastic panel on the nearside of the car, on the C-post level with the top of the back seat. At this point Vauxhall changed back to normal coloured wiring and I could identify the feed to the reversing light, so once again I fed the control unit via a fuse behind one of the plastic panels in the boot. All the subsequent wiring was as in the 12- and 14-plate cars.
Before I installed the kit in the 17-plate car, a friend suggested I fit a reversing camera instead of sensors. I tried this, but found the display that clips on the interior mirror to be useless because the reflected daylight from the rear window makes it impossible to see the image clearly. At night, it worked OK. So if you want to fit a reversing camera, perhaps a dash-mounted display might be better. Paul