Desperate times call for desperate measures. It's now illegal to talk on your cell phone in California, New York, and several other states while behind the wheel of your sport truck. Do it and you'll earn a progressively heftier fine if you're caught. So what are our options? The obvious one is to simply pull over and then make or take that phone call. Can you imagine every other car on the road sitting on the shoulder? Fat chance of that happening. Or we could run out and buy a brand-new truck that's already got a Bluetooth-ready audio system. Then again, we could get 300 tickets and still be money ahead if we didn't buy a new truck and just ignored the law. We could buy one of those Bluetooth-equipped phone headsets for less than 100 bucks and look like a reject from Star Trek. But since we don't need any other detractors in the looks department, we'll choose option number three: a Bluetooth-enabled car-audio head unit from Pioneer.
The DEH-P7000BT is a capable head unit that will play the industry-standard MP3s, WAV, AAC files, and compact discs. It will also transfer music wirelessly from Bluetooth-equipped players such as cell phones and MP3 players. But most importantly, it will sync up with our cellular phone so that we can talk and drive without touching our phone and attracting anymore unwanted attention from the Man. This is quite a leap in technology for our '73 Chevy truck, which currently has no audio system to speak of. Check it out.
Whats In The Box
In addition to the head unit, wireless remote control, and associated wiring for the hands-free microphone, Pioneer includes a CD-ROM that contains the instruction manual.
Install & features
Our '73 Chevy's dashboard was previously hacked up for a single-DIN head unit. Ignore the rest of the mess-we'll get around to restoring the interior later. For now, we need tunes and a legal way to talk on the cell.