Why Fit Dummy Speakers In Cars?
Friday, 16. February 2018
As you know I find out some very strange things and like to share them with you and all my other readers. When rear parking sensors came out I met a fitter who was making loadsamoney out of retrofitting rear parking sensors. I assumed this was a very complex exercise but it turned out to be incredibly simple and really cheap.
He told me that in virtually all the cars, into which he fitted sensors, they were already pre-wired for parking sensors. It turned out that it was cheaper for manufacturers to fit standard electric looms, including parking sensor wiring, to all cars whether they had sensors fitted or not.
In some cases, he would have to drill holes in the bumper to match up with the connectors. But there were many with blank plates inserted into pre-drilled holes that simply needed to be popped out and sensors popped in and connected. The crazy thing was that the actual sensors only cost a few pennies each so why didn’t the manufacturers simply make them a standard feature?
They would have only had to connect the sensors and connect the light and sound control units to each end of the loom, again costing no more than a couple of pounds in total, and they were good to go. So why not include the sensors as standard?
So what has all that to do with speakers? Well, it turns out that many cars without sound upgrades or sound packs have all the wiring installed but with blanking plates fitted where it looks like speakers are fitted.
Why not fit speakers as standard? They only cost a few pounds each and all the wiring is there. When you look around the inside of your car you may believe that all the speaker grills are covering speakers when in fact they don’t. When was the last time you squashed your ear to a speaker to check whether there was any sound coming out? An Audi Q2 driver didn’t actually go that far but could tell that there seemed to be no sound balance in his car.
It turned out that all four front speakers were wired up but none in the rear. It looked impressive and when questioned Audi initially said that all speakers were wired but eventually admitted that only 4 speakers were live and all of those were in the front of the car.
In the first place, they should have wired two at the front and two at the rear but better still, as all the wiring was there, why not connect up all the speakers, again for just a few pounds. I sometimes despair of the manufacturers. By Graham Hill
