My company has a new Chevy Colorado service vehicle. It came with a nice built-in backup camera, and we’d like to keep using it. Unfortunately, the camera is on the tailgate, which had to be removed to accommodate a utility box. Does anyone know of a way to relocate this to the license plate frame? I’ve searched several owner forums, but Google is not my friend today.
Are you saying that a service truck utility bed was installed? If so, a body shop that advertises custom paint, lowrider pickups, or custom body work could graft the tailgate section into the side of the new bed. Relocating the parts to the bumper area or license plate plate sounds like 1) cutting and fabricating some thick sections that are part of your bumper :eek: or 2) mounting the camera on a fairly delicate structure in a damage-prone location.
Consider how the new location may change the viewing perspective of the camera and make sure the body shop guy is prepared to adjust his work to make it functional.
Relocating the wiring should be trivial if all the original pieces were kept.
You can buy cheap backup cameras that are already built into a license plate frame (search amazon or eBay). In general, the wiring on these are pretty standard – it shouldn’t be a big deal to wire up the new camera to the factory wiring, although it’s possible you might have to extend or reroute wires to make it all work. It should be fairly easy to test for functionality before you start hacking things up.
That would probably be easier than trying to salvage the factory camera.
A shop that does custom stereo type work would be a good start if you don’t want to tackle this yourself.
…and GM surely buys their systems from Lucky Wun Hung Lo Electronic Factory…
I should have been more clear - the stock bed is still in place, and a slide-in utility box with vertical doors was added. We figured out how to remove the camera from the tailgate, so now all we have to do is figure out a way to mount it, probably on the bumper or license plate frame. I was just hoping that there was a premanufactured aftermarket solution for this.
Thanks, all.