Contents

1. Intro
2. If it’s broke, fix it yourself

Intro ↩︎

Pretty much immediately after moving to Cambridge I realised the public transport system isn’t the best. After about a year of putting up with the bus stopping every 300 metres and sometimes not even showing up, I got a bike. This gave me a lot more flexibility and cut my travel times in half, and I eventually learned that it is possible to cycle even in winter (for some southern-English definition of “winter”).

Still, I’d wanted a car for ages, and one day some helpful folks precipitated that decision by stealing my cheapo bike from the town centre in broad daylight (my only consolation being that it was in a rough shape after being static for 2 months in winter so they were going to have to spend some money before they could sell it onward). That was the spark for the fuel of lockdown-induced madness that finally pushed me over the edge to getting a car.

TL;DR: I found a great car whose swivelling radio screen wasn’t working and decided to buy it anyway and try to fix it myself. Click below for a verbose retelling.

The road to actually owning the car was fraught - cars being bought from under me within days of popping up online (one got snatched up 1 hour after I had seen it), and even needing to be pushed off the road at the end of an otherwise pleasant test drive (the text from the seller a few days letter blamed the very flat battery but I had to respectfully decline the offer to get it after it had been replaced).

However, one popped up in a town nearby and I reserved it immediately without them even having uploaded pictures and I went over to see it bright and early the following day. It was a Sunday and the only thing open so early was the bar at the train station hotel. I had not had the privilege to see cafés closed in the morning before then. I saw it, liked it, and the rest was history… though the kind that takes a few thousands words to be written out.

After a couple of delays due to in-depth servicing and whatnot it turned out the radio display that pops up from the dashboard (as the French say on forums about this - c’est la classe) wasn’t displaying anything.

They even supposedly sent it to Peugeot who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fix it, but they would replace it with an aftermarket radio for free and I could attempt to get it fixed later. I accepted.

Mid-morning on the day I was supposed to go pick it up (try focusing at work with that lined up) I get a call from the general manager of the dealership. Of course it was bad news. He tells me that there are some messages that only appear on that screen and that they are also unable to change the odometer units to miles without it (it turns out the car resets to kilometres and French menus when the battery is disconnected; it took them some time to figure out why the mileage shot up by 60% compared to the last MOT and the figure they quoted me initially). He didn’t want to give the car away like this and his advice was to give it up and they would refund the reservation fee.

After some online research I determined that nothing critical was displayed there and that I could live without that display for a few weeks until I got it fixed. I could put up with listening to the default radio channel for a bit and I figured if something really wrong happened to the car some red bulbs would light up on the dashboard. I signed a disclaimer and the car was mine (though at first I couldn’t open the top and the reason why was displayed on on the broken screen hence not visible…)

If it’s broke… ↩︎

Debugging things is much easier once you have the device on hand. I had done some general research and I discovered that this problem is fairly common with these screens - the constant up-down swivelling causes some of the twisted pairs in the cable to break. Thank goodness for the Information Superhighway - the prospective repair cost went down by some 50x thanks to the ingenuity of forumites. I suppose buying an older model car has its advantages - the common issues have been flushed out by others! The progression went like so:

1. Peugeot at some point quoted more than £1.500 to replace the whole unit.
2. New screens were around £200 on eBay (painful but much better). A seller was offering a diagnostics service for £100 where you send them the screen. Their ad mentioned replacement cables being available “at a very reasonable price”.
3. Such used cables were rare, but could be found stand-alone for £30-50.
4. Some more digging uncovered the fact that Renault was using a cable with the same connector that could be sourced new for £15 in France. This has product code 6574HP and I was able to find a retailer selling it for £17 in the UK. The only issue was that one had to replace the straight connector on it with the original angled one in order for it to fit. This looked like painstaking work and I wasn’t much looking forward to it. Some more determined people replaced the whole cable with a CAT5 one and undid the connector to hook up the individual pins to the CAT5 twisted pairs. Again, a bit too involved. Still, if this was indeed the issue, I had cut down my potential cost by some 100x.

The weekend finally came and I hopped in the car first thing in the morning. I had the tools I needed to open it up (luckily I realised I had ordered the wrong keys to unlock the radio and I managed to get the right ones on time; the upside is that I can now steal twice as many types of radios) so I went at it, very careful not to scratch anything, tear up my leather seats, or drop screws down the dashboard (which someone had already done, as I only had to unscrew 1 of 2 screws to remove the faceplate). Working in a car is pretty uncomfortable and the morning was quite cold but in the end I managed to take everything out, with the only casualties being some plastic clips that broke. From the outside, the cable looked fine, and no amount of wiggling could make it display things.

Oftentimes I lose motivation part way through a project. Upping the stakes by making my car undriveable with a road trip planned for later in the day did wonders, though.

It was time to go back inside and perform some open-sleeve surgery. Spoilers below:

Sure enough, I was greeted by this beauty:

I had never been so happy to see a broken cable before.

I was beyond pleased! I was finally able to switch the system language away from French (there’s a Brexit joke in there somewhere). Here are some more resources about the radio removal process and repair attempts. ^{1 2 3 4 5}