454 Forfour Dash Pod Fitting

Buy your dash pods. Good luck finding them.

The pods themselves connect to each other with a couple of plugs once fitted and the longer wire seen in the picture connects from the temperature pod to the existing wiring loom of the car.

The pods fit onto pre-prepared locations on the top of the dash. To fit the pods you have to remove a couple of trim covers. They can be removed easily by levering them up with a small flat blade screwdriver. Be careful not to scratch the surrounding plastic by using a microfibre cloth or old towel.

Now you have to find your pod connector. There should be an existing plug hidden behind the radio in the central area of the dashboard. To get access you will need to start by removing the radio from the car.

The plug connection that you need to access is clipped behind the actual metal structure on the left of the radio housing. I tried getting to it at this point and failed miserably. So I suggest that you also remove the black plastic housing where the radio normally is located. This is attached by 8 torx headed screws circled in red on the above picture. 2 are hidden up underneath the heater controls.

After a bit of work you should now have something like this (a large gaping hole in your car’s dashboard.

It should now be relatively easy to see the white plug that you’ve been trying to get too clipped on the left behind the metal bracket.

At this point all that is left to do is the fitting of the actual pods. This will require you to be upside down in the passenger footwell swearing for at least half an hour.

The pods themselves click into the existing holes on top of the dash. If they were being fitted by Smart they would be secured by screws from underneath to make sure that they could not move. This will not be possible without removing the dash completely. However, I’ve found that the pods do click into the holes pretty securely on their own. If you were really worried about them moving, you could probably glue them in.

Take the temperature pod and feed the long wire across, down and around the dash brackets to the plug that you have just uncovered. This can take some time and I ended up attaching a piece of solid copper wire to the wire/plug at the Pod end so that I could feed this down to the right location and then pull the pod wiring down to the right location.

Once the main wiring is plugged in you can then fit the clock pod to the left hand opening. The two pods do need to be wired together which is completed by connecting the two plugs on the shorter wires that come out of the bottom of the pods. This has to be done underneath the dash once the pods are in location. Again be aware that access is really tight behind the dash and I had to connect these plugs by feel rather than being able to see what I was doing.

Reassemble the rest of the car and enjoy watching the pods light up when you turn on the lights.

Credits

Photos and words by QueBall42 from my forfour.co.uk forum.