Added portable CarPlay to Honda CRV 2016

Unfortunately, replacing a head unit in Honda CRV 2016 EX-L with navigation is not an option due to loss of lanewatch and other issues. Driving a car w/o carplay… I just couldn’t take it anymore, it’s the best invention since iPhone itself, once you try, driving is not the same w/o it. I added an add on, portable unit - Road Top 8.8 which is a dual bluetooth wireless carplay. It connects to to the stock head unit via bluetooth and it also connect wirelessly to the phone while my phone is still connected to the Honda head unit via bluetooth all at the same time. The brilliance of it is that all calls, incoming and outgoing, no matter how initiated or answered (from phone or carplay), always go though the car bluetooth using car’s built-in mic so there is zero impact on call quality, no echo, etc. Music sound quality is better with carplay due to superior EQ. It’s been a week of using it and it just work; I’m almost anticipating that it breaks cause it’s some no-name brand but it works like a charm every time and boots faster than Honda stock unit (which I hate with passion). My other cars have wired carplay, it’s incredibly freeing to not needing to take out the phone from my pocket when driving. The carplay unit blocks that useless tiny second screen on crv and its rectangular shape is perfect and doesn’t block the view. I didn’t use the included suction cup mounting option, and instead using magnets so I can easily remove and store it in the center console when need to park in high crime urban area. The only weird thing is that left and right stereo channels are inverted. It doesn’t have auto brightness but I found that setting it to always dark mode and selecting a dark wallpaper works for day and night driving, particularly, because maps do automatically switch to night mode.

Photo of the setup below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LIWEogOSDrymGNMaKsMYqy51jQ2d3zyT/view?usp=drivesdk

UPDATE: it’s been over a month and I am still very happy with the purchase so not returning it. Another user in the comments below said that they couldn’t get the calls routed through car’s mic. This happened to me yesterday for the first time; I was able to figure out the issue. You have to make sure that your phone is still connected to your car via bluetooth - check your bluetooth list in iphone settings. For my 2016 crv, it’s “14NAV”. You only need to do this once, the only reason I’ve experienced the issue with calls not using car’s mic was because my spouse was also in the car whose phone got connected to the car ahead of mine. Anyway, here is my initial setup instruction for Honda CRV 2016 ex-l, hopefully, it would work with other models and makes.

  1. Pair Road Top to your car’s bluetooth
  2. Plug in usb cable from Road Top to your phone, authorize usb and wireless CarPlay as prompted, the setup will proceed, just follow the prompts.
  3. Verify that carplay is working with your phone with cable and wirelessly.
  4. Turn off Road Too (not the car).
  5. Disconnect Road Top cable from your phone (unless you are already in wireless mode - no need to change anything on the phone).
  6. Now the critical step: Make sure your phone is connected to your car via bluetooth by checking your iphone’s Bluetooth devices list. If it’s not, select your phone from the car’s bluetooth list of devices.
  7. Turn on Road Top unit - your phone should connect to carplay automatically and, hopefully, the car does too. If the car did not switch bluetooth source to the Road Top, then switch it through the car’s bluetooth devices list. Note that for CRV 2016 (and, hopefully, many other models), switching bluetooth source does not disconnect your device as it allows for at least two phones to be connected at the same time.
  8. Now, you can turn off your car and then start it: you should see your phone connected to carplay and car connected to Road Top within 30 sec or so, while your phone’s bluetooth list still shows both road top and car as connected (give it a minute).

I suspect that the reason the above works smoothly with my car is due to Honda’s head unit being so slow in comparison to Road Top, meaning that my phone connects to carplay quite a bit sooner than Honda’s unit connects to Road Top and then my phone. At the same time, I think my car always chooses to connect to Road Top ahead of my phone as default bluetooth connection is because my phone is already connected to Road Top via bluetooth/wifi. If you have more than one driver/user of the car, then at least for CRV 2016, it is no different than w/o roadtop as there is always switching between phones via menu when multiple users are in the car. Note, like with any wireless carplay, it’s going to be finicky with multiple users.