Bought a Skoda Fabia. Would like to upgrade the head unit.

Soldato
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So picked up 2014 Fabia monti Carlo black edition. So far it’s im really please with it.

It’s got basic OEM sat nav but it would be nice to upgrade to something with carplay and maybe a camera and or parking sensors.

Any suggestions?
 
Soldato
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As long as it's a din fitting and not one of the stupid proprietary ones there are loads of options. The big brands like Kenwood, Pioneer etc are better than the cheaper Chinese ones but are way more expensive.
 
Soldato
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Get on Briskoda, there may be a guide to upgrade to a later OEM unit.

It's quite a popular upgrade on the prefacelift Octavia to get the headunit from the facelift, which includes things like SmartLink for carplay.

With vcds/OBDEleven there's also a good chance at retrofitting parking sensors or reversing cameras if they were ever offered from new.

Edit - 2014 was when they changed from mk2 to mk3 Fabia, if you have a mk2 you'll probably have to go aftermarket, as the units changed shape from 2 to 3.
 
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Underboss
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Well, with the Focus MK3 i saw a guide recently that you can swap the screen out for one of the bigger better ones

you may find your able to do that, i would check the Skoda owners club forums for advice, there may be a guide or 2
 
Associate
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Isn't the fabia of that era the same shape / style of unit fitted to the other Skodas such as the Octavia? If so you should be able to fit the RCD330+ without much issue at all. I swapped the standard bolero unit in my Octavia for one and it was essentially a straight swap save for a trim adapter. If my Octavia had origionally been fitted with the upgraded columbus stereo then this wouldn't have been needed at all as it's only the Boleros that were a different shape.

My experience of the radio was that it was essentially an upgrade all around from the standard fit Bolero save for the radio portion. With them being chinese units it was missing things like RDS / Traffic reports and was really just a very basic fm tuner. As I never use radio this simply wasn't important to me at all. I mainly used mine with an SD card and in that respect it was leagues ahead. The bolero would take 40-60 seconds to read my 8GB SD card and actually start playing music. If it was removed/re-inserted it could take several minutes and browsing through the files / folders was slow. On the RCD330+ I changed to a 32GB SD card and everything was essentially instant, maybe a minute or so to index on a first insertion, but then playback always started within 5 seconds after that and I'd actually say searching through artists was faster on that than it is on the SYNC3 unit in my current Mondeo!

Carplay on the unit was brilliant. Plug in with USB and away you go. Everything functions exactly as you would expect and it all just worked as though it were fitted from the factory. They also have blueooth fitted with their own internal microphone so you don't have to worry about running another mic wire or similiar.

Sound quality was on par with my origional Bolero unit, perhaps just a little improved in some circumstances, but certainly nothing to write home about. The good news is it didn't get any worse.

I didn't have them on my car but if you have parking sensors / a reverse camera then the unit should recognise those as well and they then all work in the same way as the origional units. The only slight issue I did have was that my car had the coding enabled for a reverse camera, but no camera fitted. This meant that the first time I changed into reverse on each start of the engine, the camera would try to engage and I had to click on a camera error warning to clear the message before a normal image woudl resume. I was able to have this coding turned off when I had the car serviced for about £20 though so it wasn't too much of an issue.

Unfortunately as I've got part way through writing this and gone to check prices it looks like sellers have finally cottoned on to how many people are interested in these and the price of them has shot up. I only paid £190 for mine 18 months ago and the exact same unit from the same seller is now £300 and it looks like most others are the same. If I had a do over I would probably still spend £300 on the unit though as the only other option that fits properly is that kenwood mentioned above and you will struggle to get one of those for less than £1000 so the RCD330 is still a cheap option!

You could save some money by having the VW version of the unit. You will get a VW logo when it turns on and the lights will probably be vw red instead of skoda green, but if you can live with that then the VW Versions look to be going for more like £220 so it's a nice saving. I'm not 100% certain that this will all work in the same plug and play manenr but it's essentially the same unit so I don't see why not.

If you do go for one of these make sure it's a 330+ and not the standard 330. The latter doesn't have carplay. The most obvious tell is that the 330+ has buttons on the right hand side that say phone / app / setup. On the basic version they will say mute / setup / phone. It's the app button that gets you into the car play menu.

Hope this helps!
 
Soldato
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thanks a lot, i will order one tomorrow. I like to keep things OEM if I can, there seem to be lots for sale on ebay. Most out of china, are they copies or original VW?
 
Soldato
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thanks a lot, i will order one tomorrow. I like to keep things OEM if I can, there seem to be lots for sale on ebay. Most out of china, are they copies or original VW?

Looking around I think the RCD330+ is an OEM unit from the Chinese market. I didn't realise there was a 330+ as opposed to the 330 which is what I assumed you already have. It seems there are a couple of different manufacturers and various part numbers as some include AA/AC, some don't, some support AC but not AA, some have upgradable firmware, some don't. Worth making sure you're getting the version you want before ordering up. I can't imagine there is much market here for the non-upgradable, non-AA/AC units but worth being sure.
 
Soldato
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Do you think they are genuinely OEM ? or a lesser quality - some compromise on the fm radio - OK, but if the other components and sound quality, not as good then that's another issue.

(similar to recent bmw HU discussion), they seem to be on Aliexpress too eg. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32959986890.htm at £130, but would get hit by customs,
unless, like bangagood, you have an eu warehouse/source.
 
Associate
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My understanding is they are OEM. The suggestion I had was that they come out of cars designed for the Chinese market like the VW Lavida / Santana and others we don't get over here. The implication is that they are units removed from cars where buyers have specified upgrades at the point of sale and then the basic fit rcd330+ becomes redundant and finds it's way to the second hand market.

The bay is pretty good for it's item descriptions. As long ias it's got the "app" button it should have both CarPlay and Andoid Auto (And Mirror link for the chinese). Mine certainly did.

One other thought that comes to mine is be careful when you factory reset them. I did that when I sold the car to wipe contacts etc and it factory reset to chinese. Getting it back into english was.......... interesting.
 
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