Added blind spot & parking sensors, trunk lighting, rear USB, horntones, black wheels
Hi all,
In September I posted about the initial modifications made to my Sig S:
Collision warning, radar detection, window film paint armor installed on my S
Last week my car went back under the knife with Elie's team at
Al & Eds West Hollywood for a few more improvements. Noting so exciting as
Ian did, but some unique things nonetheless so I thought I'd update you all with a new thread given the old title doesn't really fit anymore. (Mods, feel free to merge and revise title if you prefer.)
Powder Coated Black 21" Wheels:
Elie already posted pics of this bit. Frankly, I'm not really into cosmetic changes, but I had always thought that the car would look better with the wheels black rather than grey. So when Elie suggested it and the price was right, I figured why not. Well, I'm super happy with the result.
Verdict: Very happy. :biggrin:
Blind spot sensor:
I do a
ton of freeway driving. One thing that I find a bit uncomfortable in the S is I'm frequently surprised to find a car appear from my blind spot that I didn't know was there. When I learned to drive, I was taught to always be aware of all the cars around me. So this really creeps me out every time it happens as it makes me worried I'm going to end up changing lanes into someone one of these days.
I considered
a blind spot mirror (which is certainly a cheaper solution), but I just couldn't bring myself to do it: It's one thing to not be into making cosmetic improvements, its another to do something that just looks cheap on such a gorgeous car.
Well, these sensors work great. The notification is something you can't miss when you look at the side mirror to make a lane change, but is very unobtrusive otherwise. Following up on
Ian's post, it seems like Elie's team has worked out these kinks. It's much better without sound, and sound really isn't at all necessary. The visual warning is plenty since you are looking in that direction anyway. As far as the crossed wires he reported, mine clearly is setup properly: When I signal right and something is to my right, the right light flashes. Objects to my left are ignored and the left sensor remains dark. Of course the opposite is true when I signal left. Thanks for being the guinea pig to help them work out all the kinks Ian!
You can see the outside of these in Elie's pics like this one:
It's black because apparently the blind spot sensors can't take the four-coat paint and still work properly. But really, I don't even notice it so not terribly unhappy with that. The product works great.
Verdict: Very happy. :biggrin:
Parking sensors:
I'm not quite as happy with these yet. I'm hoping Elie's team can tune them to work better. I'm just getting too many false alarms, and I fear that it will just train me to ignore them. The front sensor seems to need some kind of calibration as it beeps randomly when traveling at high speed. I suspect they just didn't account for the car going into low suspension mode at higher speeds, and the car is just picking up the ground. Thankfully they gave me a power switch for the front sensor, so I can disable it when this happens, but inevitably I forget to turn it back on again which negates the benefit of having the sensor at all.
The rear sensor works better, which is good because I'm not aware of any way to turn it off. But another thing is that both the front and rear sensors pick up objects not just in the car's path but to the sides as well. When I pull up my driveway to my garage, I drive between my wife's SUV and some bushes. There's probably a foot of clearance on each side, but both the front and rear sensors beep the entire way up the driveway even though no objects are in the path of the car forward or backward. As a result, I'm not sure I'd know if there was actually something to be worried about in my path that I couldn't see. It beeps differently depending on proximity, so if I got within one foot of a solid object, I think I'd notice the change in tone.
The paint matching is very very nice. The installation really looks factory installed as you can see in these pictures:
Verdict: Needs some calibration work. Ask me again later. 
Trunk lighting:
Got a big win with some additional trunk lighting. I had been frustrated by how dark the trunk is at night with only the one little overhead light on the trunk door. I would be rooting around in the trunk to find something, and just couldn't see anything. Max at Al & Eds came up with these strip lights and the way they are mounted they look totally factory installed. The trunk is now fully and beautifully lit!
Verdict: Awesome! I love it!!! :love:
USB outlets in back seat:
We do a lot of family road trips, and we're an Apple device family so the kids are usually watching and playing with iPads in the back seat n these longs trips. A source of some inconvenience was the limited charging options in the car. Between my wife's and my phones, a USB stick for music, an LTE hotspot, the kids iPads, and a couple other random devices there's simply no way to keep them all plugged in. Al & Eds came up with these additional 2.1 amp USB outlets for me for the back seat. Locating them was pretty hard because there wasn't a good spot that wouldn't really seem obtrusive.
The best compromise was this location at the bottom of the back of the center console. It's a little hard to reach from the back seat, but it avoids a cable mess running to the front seat and its close enough for standard iPhone cords to reach the devices attached to the back of the front seats or in the kids laps. And it avoided anything that would interfere with someone sitting in the center seat. Its great how unobtrusive this is. It's flush and very subtle, yet nearly doubles the charging capacity of the car. My understanding is it’s wired to a separate breaker from the front 12v outlet so it doesn't compete for power.
Verdict: Awesome! I love it!!! :love:
Mount for displays below 17" display:
I loved what they did for Ian in his for mounting the radar and Mobileye display, so I asked them to do the same for me. I just didn't like the way that mounted individually these displays just didn't fit in with the smooth lines of the Model S dash. This mount completely changes the dynamic in my opinion and everything fits in much better.
Verdict: Awesome! I love it!!! :love:
Horntones:
Ian had this fun thing in his Roadster that let him make crazy fun sound effects from his car. This tickled my funny bone in a car that has no motor noise. Plus I have kids, and I knew how much fun they'd have with it. Now I can't get them to stop pushing the buttons and scaring people around me! You can see the control panel for it in the picture above. That's a temporary location. I plan to get a drop in center console, and I'll move this control panel inside of that.
It's a totally frivolous thing, but it works perfectly. Al & Eds doesn't sell the product: I bought it myself and paid Elie's guys to put it in for me since they did it before with Ian's. They did a perfect job! You can find out more about the product here.
Horntones MP3 Car Horn is an air horn, train horn, fog horn and musical horn.
We've loaded it up with our own sounds. I'm a big Disneyland nut, so I put in the monorail horn and a bunch of other Disneyland sound effects ("Termine ser sentados, por favor!"). Other examples are the scanner sounds of KITT and Cylons (great for slowing driving through parking lots), HAL introducing himself, Star Trek warp sounds (great for accelerating), and various Star Wars sound effects like Darth Vader breathing. Dropping the kids off at school will never be the same.
Verdict: Very happy. :biggrin:
Whew, lots of stuff and really pleased with how it came out. My intent was to be done once and for all, and to have the car I want for the long term. The Model S is such a fantastic car, and I just wanted a few little tweaks and now I have them! Thanks Elie.
