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by ChrisMarshallNY 131 days ago
I’m pretty sure that you can buy aftermarket backup cameras. The car can be a dumb bunny, and still have a good camera.
2 comments

Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.
oh yeah. I've once bought a $10ish one on Amazon out of curiosity.

There's the yellow composite plug, a 12V input, and a small bit of wire to be cut to rotate image 180 degrees, at the other end of a 30ft cable from the camera. The composite goes into the existing infotainment. There would be a wire from shifter to infotainment that switches the display to external composite video when the gear lever is in reverse. I think it even came with a miniature hole saw in size of the camera module.

$10 and one afternoon later, I could have upgraded a dumb car to have one, complete with auto switch to backup on reverse. No software hacking needed. It's fundamentally an extremely simple thing.