Tacoma Phone Mount

It is time to clean up all the wires coming out of the dash and stop trying to constantly balance a phone in my lap.

BACKGROUND

My Tacoma is a 2009 (2nd Gen) model. I love it. I replaced the stock head unit almost immediately after purchasing (with a Pioneer AVIC-F700BT). At that time (2008), luxuries such as Android Auto just weren’t a thing. I did my best with what I had and souped it up so that I could use my iPod to listen to music while it was tucked into my center console. I could even control it with the steering wheel controls. It was awesome.

But now it is dated.

The adapter I had for the iPod connectivy doesn’t connect to anything anymore and even the technology in the head unit doesn’t recognize most technologies of today. So I end up plugging a 3.5mm jack from a source into an input in the front of the head unit. It is super ugly to have that hanging off my dash at all times but I work with what I’ve got and I don’t think even having a mount will fix that (I’ll research what I did to get the iPod connection in the back, but I tend to think that the converter isn’t made for common connections because the unit is over 10 yrs old…).

In addition to it being unsightly, I’m pretty sure having to balance whatever is playing music in my lap has rendered my balls useless.

Because of some unfortunate events and horribly timing (long story) I actually have 2 functional and not-too-old phones. Because the new one does not have a headphone jack (which pisses me right off), I’ve been using the older one as a “car” phone which I use to play downloaded music. I can also enable my actual phone as a hotspot and connect to it to stream music and navigate with the old phone that does not have cellular service (the GPS maps on my 10yr old head unit are very much worthless at this point).

Pretty neat idea, but I still end up with wires everywhere and now balancing multiple phones which are frying my balls. So I need to come up with a way to mount at least one of these.

SOLUTION

As usual, the awesome folks at TacomaWorld have a lot of great suggestions. But I think I’ll be doing something very similar to MOD: A-Pillar RAM mount GPS/Phone holder. That seems to get the phone out of my view while not blocking a vent. I’ll likely need to re-run some wiring, but if I make one of the ports right below this a USB port that will help (search the entire 40x pages for fuse tap and USB port recommendations).

NEXT STEPS

• Sort throught the thread to figure out what parts are necessary
• Purchase the parts and dedicate time to do this

SIDE NOTES

• I originally considered replacing the head unit with something more modern. I still think this is a good approach, but the mounting solution I’m looking at implementing is a couple hundred dollars less expensive and I am cheap.

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