Have you ever pulled into a car park with your favorite song blaring, only to lament the fact that the music cut out when you stopped the engine? Some modern cars are smart enough to keep the radio on until you open the door. [ssh16] decided to hack that very functionality into their Mazda MX-5.
The device uses a microcontroller to read the CAN bus of the vehicle. The microcontroller also has the ability to keep the vehicle’s ACC (accessory) relay energized at will. Thus, when the engine is turned off, the microcontroller keeps the ACC relay on, maintaining power to the stereo and infotainment system. Then, after ten minutes, or when it receives a CAN message that the driver’s door has been opened, it cuts power to the relay, shutting the accessories off. It’s a simple build, but one that [ssh16] executed cleanly. By putting the microcontroller on a neat PCB with a harness that can clip into the stock Mazda one, it’s possible to install the hack without needing to cut any wires. Plus, with a small modification, it was even possible to use the same hack with a Mazda CX-5.
Whether you’re jamming out to a cool song, or you just want to finish a phone call over Bluetooth, it’s a nifty feature to have in a vehicle. We’ve seen some other neat infotainment hacks before, too. Video after the break.
Maybe not on a Mazda, but on my Nissan a double-tap of the start-stop button kills the engine while leaving it in “ON” rather than dropping straight into “off”.
Which Nissan?
I’ve a Qashquai, and yes, entertainment devices remain on.
Only for a few minutes.
;-{
370Z. It’s the “emergency stop” function, it overrides the maximum speed limit on the “off” function which normally protects you from accidentally shutting the car off while on the road, I believe.
A trick you can use, at least with my 2016 CX-5, is to put the car in neutral, turn off the engine, then put it into park. The radio will stay on for something like 10 minutes.
It definitely isn’t as nice as the poster’s setup, but way better than no radio.
Yep. That’s what I’ve always done. Just don’t forget to put it back in park before releasing the break like I’ve done a couple times
That trick works on my 2021 CX-5 also, but what I like even better is to put it into Park but keep the shifter release button depressed while you turn the engine off; a little awkward the first few times but I got used to it and now use this process frequently.
All Ford vehicles have done this for at least 15 years. One thing you have to watch for is battery drain. During that 10 minutes my car stays on after the engine is cut it is drawing > 4 amps from the battery. This will kill a conventional flooded battery flat if you use it very often. All the Fords I have driven that stay on like this have shipped with AGM batteries most likely for this reason.
To further that, on newer Fords, once that 10 minute timer is out (or if you just get in it and sit there), if you push the power button on the (stock) headunit it WILL start up and last an hour or until the battery saver says enough.
My Fusion Hybrid allows radio-on for an hour. If you take a Bluetooth call for that entire time, you’ll actually get a warning towards the end — “Powering down in 3 minutes. Call will be sent to phone” as a warning. ;)
That’s less than 1Ah draw from what would normally be what, a 70Ah battery – what’s up with your battery that it can’t cope with that? I used to spend every lunch sat in my car for 45 minutes with the stereo and fans on, then go back into work. Never a problem.
Probably depends on the battery, but post-2005 Fords are particularly hard on the battery when the engine isn’t running. It’s not just running the radio. I ran a Hyundai Elantra with the original flooded battery for nearly 7 years, but the Ford Fusion that replaced it killed a much more expensive AGM battery in less than two years without any tricks like the OP is suggesting. And this is in New Orleans, where it generally doesn’t get cold.
I used to sit through two drive-in movies in my Silverado that had an amp and two 12″ subwoofers under the rear seat. Never had an issue starting after two movies.
15 years?
Back in the latter 1960s my dad’s F100 would play the radio without a key in the ignition.
All you had to do was engage the turn signal. The radio would play intermittent with the turn signal!
😁
The trick was to use the hazard blinkers and step on the brake to stop the ‘flashing’ :-)
When I was a kid I figured out how to listen to the radio in my dad’s 69 ford without the key. I found that if I turned on the hazard blinkers and then stepped on the brake pedal just right.. power would flow through the brake lights and into the accessories side of the ignition turning on the radio.
My 20-year-old Toyota Celica leaves the radio on for a few minutes after the car stops or until a door is opened. It’s not long enough to be a battery issue, but my brother’s Honda Element from the same era leaves something on, what sounds like it might be the power steering pump, whenever the key is in the ignition, regardless of the position it is rotated to. Leaving the key in the Honda for only a few hours can flatten the battery.
My 2017 Cruze does this too. Turn the car off and the radio will stay on for like 10 minutes or until you open the driver’s door.
Interesting that you can command ACC power through CAN bus…
Whoops never mind, looks like he’s stuffing his own power back on ACC.. I need to read better
Man where was this during the pandemic? One of the local movie theaters converted the side of their building into a make-shift drive-in. “Great! I’m so bored and I’ll do anything to get out of this house!”. They had it where ya tune your car’s radio to a frequency to get the sound, “Cool. My hearing impaired self will actually be able to hear the film for once”
Only to discover my Mazda 3 turns the radio off every 10~ minutes when in ACC mode.
Minor annoyance, good car overall so far!
Honestly, the manufacturers should make this user-configurable in the UI as preferences vary… I want it to turn off with the engine because when I unplug my phone (Android Auto), it falls back to FM radio which is considerably louder… I have now got into the somewhat unsafe habit of turning the car off, opening the door, THEN dealing with my phone and odds & sods I need to take with me, all with the door open.
As long as we’re complaining about obvious things a modern car -should- do, may I add my (unrelated) pet peeve?
Every new car has a large LCD display for “infotainment,” yet when something goes wrong with the drive train, the best notification you can hope for is a stupid “check engine” light.
It’s a cheap and obvious improvement to have the existing electronics act as its own OBD reader and display, in codes AND in plaintext, what the car thinks is wrong. In fact, there is no reason why ALL live engine parameters shouldn’t be available on some user-accessible page.
My info display wastes RAM, flash, and CPU on three pages of XM satellite functionality I paid for but never wanted, but I actually had to buy a third-part OBD reader to know that the o-ring on my gas cap was going bad?
+++++ 1
+1. Sure would be a better use for the screen. Just like the console in an airliner cockpit showing all the monitored systems parameters/settings/current values. Maybe I would actually unblank the screen if that was shown rather than the silly apps….
Mazda does it practically perfectly wrong. The center gauge is actually a display, and it will use the inside of it (while the outside remains a speedometer) to display error messages – and they’re both useless and wrong! For example if you drive into the setting sun, the front radar unit will overload and the car will display… “Mazda Radar cruise control disabled below 20 mph”. Or if you’re in a dirty environment and the side sensors for lane occupancy get covered in road grime, the center cluster will display.. “Mazda Radar cruise control disabled blow 20 mph”.
The best part is, radar cruise works just fine all the way down to stop!
If they do that, they start to open up the floodgates to DIY repairs and drop footfall at their dealer network – can’t have that. Let’s be honest, they could include the full workshop manual and point you to likely faults too, with very little effort.
Car repair Lobbies. Probably in the 80s. The dash used to be able to blink a code. In CA its illegal to read codes at the local auto store.
buy a wireless android auto dongle
On my Hyundai, as I don’t really use radio (too many ads), I set it to XM 0, which is some sort of silent channel they have. I leave the radio on that so when I unplug my phone, it goes silent!
Can you not set the relative input volumes? On my stereo it’s “SLA” setting, on others I’ve seen it’s called something else I forget. Basically pre-amp setting for each input type.
I have the same niggle with nav apps that let you play music then voice over the music, either the voice is so quiet you can’t hear it, or you have to have the music crazy loud. Only Waze, so far I think, has got separate vols (at least last time I checked)
Does your car have a CD player or Line-In? On mine at least it falls back to the last selected source, so picking an “Empty” CD or Line-In cable with nothing plugged into the other end works around this issue for me.
BMW 3-series 2016 does the same. After only a few minutes it shuts of the music, then you CAN start it again but Bluetooth has to be reconnected which is a serious PITA with my OnePlus 7 :)
I haven’t had a pushbutton, but needing to hack it to get back what the simpler system had is a bit frustrating… nice that it’s possible though!
The wild thing I saw with some cars is an inability to roll the windows when the key is in ACC. You’ve got to turn it to ON for a moment, then back to ACC to reduce your power consumption since being ON but not idling is even worse than the modern fast drain of being in ACC.
Interesting, I know my cars have done this already, but they have only been 2002 thru 2007 at least. Maybe the newer cars dropped this feature when they went to push button start?
That was my conclusion too. My 2011 car still has a keyed ignition, and will keep accessories on after the engine stops while the key is in. I note that the images from the fine writeup show a start/stop button.
My car has the opposite problem. It’s a Hyundai Sonata Hybrid and it leaves the audio system on after I power the car off. Seems like that’s exactly what the OP wanted, right? Well, it’s a hybrid, so if you just want to listen to the radio, you might as well leave the car ‘on’. Since it’s a hybrid, it’ll turn the engine off when it doesn’t need: power generation, A/C, or heating. That seems to be what the OP wants their vehicle to do, but in this case, you don’t need to do anything.
When I do *want* my car to shut up, I can’t do so by turning the ingnition off. I have to open a door or turn the A/V system off manually. The hybrid needs the old ‘turn off when turned off’ behavior while the plain IC vehicles need the new “stay on until the door opens”. Or, as Hope28 says, just make the damn setting configurable!!!!
I got tired of my radio cutting off and having to reboot every time I switched the ignition switch from On to Acc in my 90’s model Ford pickups, so I put a 5 farad capacitor in the power line of each one. That keeps the radio energized for a minute or two with the key switches power off and back on. Simple solution to an annoying problem!
[quote]Have you ever pulled into a car park with your favorite song blaring, only to lament the fact that the music cut out when you stopped the engine?[/quote] Ah, no. 99.9% of the time the radio is off. Same with the console screen as we leave ‘blank’. Wasted area as far as I am concerned … yet you have to pay (via car price) for all that electronic/software stuff you never use. Since almost every one has a cell phone now. Use that for your ‘entertainment’ system and simplify the car systems! :)
There is one thing that does bug me though. They spend all that money … and yet they don’t sync the car clock to GPS. Every time change occurs, or its not the correct time, you have to ‘manually’ set it in all four of our vehicles. Usually digging out the manual to find out where on the display to set it. Setting the truck is easy though as long as you have a pencil to push the two tiny buttons. Still….
That said, cool beans that you got it working the way ‘you’ like it!!! That’s all that matters.
Not to mention the clock runs fast or slow.
But my Honda wont let me adjust the clock with the engine running.
I guess that’s ok, doing so would be too complicated for a passenger.😵
Cell phone for the only source of music while driving? Ouch. But really, while I don’t need or want a tablet in the dash, a clock radio with bluetooth and some cheap speakers in the door pockets is such a tiny expense compared to the cost of a modern vehicle that I see no reason to exclude it. Using the same controls for a few settings seems perfectly reasonable use of resources. I like having electric windows and can see serious utility in remote start, too. I’d much rather that sort of thing than the sensors and control overrides that make some modern cars (and even trucks) freak out and cause problems if you try to drive through tall grass or open the door to look down while parking.
I don’t mind air conditioning, power locks, power steering, intermittent wind shield wipers, all wheel drive, standard cruise control (not adaptive), defrosters heat, and comfortable power seat. Sticking your cell phone into a USB port and connect to your car speakers … fine (that’s what I meant above). But no wireless access, blue tooth or otherwise (it is a security problem) . Nor do I like all the safety sensors, eye-sight, and all the interlocks that go with it. More stuff to go wrong. All the dings and dongs as traffic moves around you… Nor moving head lights as that is just more expensive to fix down the road. Nor the Star Link, On Star, or whatever they call it to keep in touch with big brother. Or SiriusX. Sure you don’t have to use it (ie. pay for it), but it is still ‘active’ in your vehicle. ‘They’ can still get to your car – listen to conversations, change things, etc. without you knowing. The only access to ‘my’ vehicle should be via a cable they have to plug in at the service center from the inside. That is it. No up/down link to a service/internet in the car (use your highly complex cell phone for any that stuff) period.
Pipe dream, but I would like to see where you ‘pick’ whether you even want this stuff installed in the car in the first place. Paying this much money you should be able to pick and choose from basic to extreme and pay accordingly when you order up your vehicle.
Well, I’ve had bluetooth in cars ever since I plugged an adapter into my cassette deck. A basic level of function doesn’t need to be problematic, especially since the basic ones tend to be somewhat isolated from the rest of the car and can be swapped with aftermarket stereos sometimes. The built-in kind, even the ones not tied into any other systems, might at least have mic access like mine does, but that’s also fine so long as they don’t have two-way communication whether via their own modem or by satellite. I hadn’t noticed that sirius xm now has two-way, because it always used to be one way only, but I do see the “360L” thing in an article.
They do include more than I’d like in terms of various things now, but that’s because they know they’ll get more money if they sell expensive vehicles with lots of standard features, no matter if you actually want them. Things like work trucks sometimes pressure them to bend a little, so that for instance Ram had to continue producing their last-gen pickups rebranded as “classic” with more utilitarian options available on the lower end.
My wife’s 2021 Chevy Equinox sets its time from something, it’s always exactly in sync with my cell phone without us ever having set it, and it does DST time changes automatically. The aftermarket stereos in our 2005 Dodge truck and 2003 GMC have to be set manually. I had an aftermarket stereo in my old truck that *tried* to set the time from a signal from FM radio, but I had to get the manual out to figure out how to turn that off, as it consistantly set it to the wrong time zone. Very annoying.
I wish my 2021 Nissan did that.. I mean, it has it’s own cellphone connection , GPS receiver, satellite radio receiver
and connection to my cell phone in my pocket via bluetooth.. you would think it could at least set the damned clock..
Fetching the time from the GPS gives you UTC, not your local time nor summer/winter time.
I removed the pityfull “infotainment system” from my car (Mitsubishi) and put a vintage RDS radio / cd / usb for mp3 files.
The RDS system displays the clock on the screen, there is no need to setup the time (winter / summer) it’s always ok even when playing mp3. I changed the backscreen LED light to get more brightness.
I also added a CAN data read / display device to check engine parameters and mainly display coolant temperature / battery voltage / instant fuel consumption.
Then I removed the battery +12v from the OBD2 plug.
There is a trick that works for the 2023 CX-50, you just need to hold the gear lever button while putting it in park, and without releasing it press the start-stop button. It kills the engine but allows the radio to stay on for another 15 minutes.
My new VW and my 2002 VW keeps the music playing until you open the door. You can always turn it back on without they key as well. Always loved that feature.
Nobody is going to comment on how this hack is from 2019? He’s been selling these cable harnesses online for pretty much all that time. I know because I own one :)
555 with a relay.
Showing my age here, but back in the day, most VW Beetles’ radios (my Dad’s was factory standard Blaupunkt) were powered independently from the ignition switch. You could listen to your heart’s content without even having the key. I can’t imagine that radio and puny speakers drew much current.
In fact, I had a friend in college who drove a Beetle and never turned off his radio. When walking past the parking lot just outside of our club’s Ham radio shack, if you heard music coming from a parked car, you knew Jim Jarvis was in the building.
I have the opposite problem.
I don’t want the radio on. Ever.
Too bad that isn’t an option on a modern Subaru!
The radio turns on every time you start the car. It respects whatever the last FM/AM/Sirius section you were in, but sets the station to whatever favorite #1 is for that radio.
AND IT SETS THE VOLUME TO 50%.
I have lost track of the number of times I have had the shit scared out of me by a LOUD radio upon starting my car after a family member drove it and listened to the radio.
There is no way to disable this “feature”, despite there being thousands of requests for it. (Literally. There was a poll on the Subaru forums with like 7k votes. I don’t know anyone who would be going on the actual manufacturer foum for a car for anything. That has got to be a significant number of their user base.)
Thhe only workaround we have is to set the #1 Sirius station to the hidden data test channel which requires no subscription and has no audio, THEN make sure it is always the last station played before you shut the car off.
I like to run a wire straight to the battery (fused at the battery of course) for both my stereo and ham radio. I connect that directly to the always-on power input of the stereo.
Then for the ignition input of the stereo and the power input of the ham radio, instead of connecting it to the stock switched source I connect it also to the direct battery connection but through a relay. I connect the switched source to the coil of the relay.
Finally I bypass the relay with a toggle switch so that I can use the stereo or ham radio when parked. I have to be careful when doing that to not run down the battery too far of course.