Replacing Universal Rear View Mirror with Auto Dimming Mirror

dang, i thought you had instructions. i'll be following, all the best!

 

Can you post some pictures of your project. As I would like to do the same upgrade if you are successful.

 

There is almost always a wire harness in the overhead area designated for a rearview mirror. Sometimes it is used with the factory mirror, sometimes it is just taped up out of the way.

Auto-dim mirrors typically need 3 wire connections: ground, +12v and reverse/remote override. The first two are self explanatory, the third is to automatically undim the mirror when in reverse gear although not all cars use this feature.

 

My 2007 parts car had the auto dim mirror with homelink, etc. I completely stripped the interior, including the wire harness located in the headliner. I can take a look at it tonight and throw some photos on the thread so you can see how it connects in and whether you can modify a normal harness. I was planning on doing the same to my 2007, since it has just the plain mirror. I just haven't had time to see what I need to modify on my 'basic' harness.

 

So here we go. One is a photo of the wires going into the mirror. The second photo just shows how long the three wires are before they even start grouping together with the rest of the harness. The third photo is the Toyota part number tag attached to the harnesssssss. This section of the harness is the part that is above the headliner. There's another section that attaches just above the hatch and then goes to the hatch.

It would be pretty sweet if this harness was installed on all Gen 2 models and the mirror wires were just tucked up in the headliner. If anyone checks it out, let us know, otherwise I'll be tearing into a headliner next time I see a base model at a salvage yard.

 

Very nice work. Many thanks!!!!

 

I looked into this cost wise and noticed many ebay resellers included the sub-harness that connects directly to the used OEM mirrors. This led me to think that those sub-harnesses are needed for a swap but that's just a WAG. Yeah, it'd be great if this was a true plug-n-play mod on the gen 2 but surely someone would have discovered this by now (?).

Although homelink would be nice, auto-dimming is more important for me. I decided to try an electronic mirror that mounts to the stock mirror and uses an HD rear camera for the view. The camera's auto-exposure ability does well for reducing bright lights and has the added bonus of a front camera too while recording both views to microSD card. If the lights are very bright, one can always switch the mirror to front camera view for some quick relief (or use the physical toggle switch on the OEM mirror). Typical chinese build quality but the image is WAY better than the stock, low definition rear camera which is unaffected in operation.

Finally, dealing with BAV's (big a$$ vehicles) behind the gen 2 typically means the their headlights are wide enough to shine directly into the side mirrors too. Our former Subaru Outback also had auto-dimming side mirrors and without those, an auto-dimming rear mirror is only getting the job half done.

 

Awesome @TMR-JWAP . Please let me know what you find at the yard. I'd like to do the regular to auto dimming mirror swap myself. I have the mirror and partial pgtail at the mirror. Thank you

 

I have checked the wire assembly and is different from base model. I think the best way to do is adding extra wires to power it on. See the base model is blue wrap and with homelink wire is brown wrap.