My Volvo is a V60 MY12 and comes with an analogue Dashboard. Just a few years after I bought my car as second hand car, a new model came out with a digital dashboard. At first I was proud of my analogue dashboard, but in the last years in fact it looked a little too old style. Looking at the old and new dashboard I noticed they had the same form and size. So googling around for a I while i discovered that the retrofit isn’t very complex. The two dashboards shared also the same connector with the car and almost the same pin layout. In fact the new digital Dashboard has two additional cables for a canbus connection.
I also found some mounting instructions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX03RHOQxNQ), possible issues and solutions. A company also provides software update (https://d5t5.com) for the TFT dashboard if something isn’t working correctly. I bought a used TFT dashbord from the USA, shipping expenses were very high. Following the instructions everything works fine. If you don’t connect the canbus many functions don’t work including power indicator and ecosystem indicator. After the installation and without any kind of software update almost everything works, the only two exceptions are the TPMS indicator and the fuel indicator. In particular the fuel indicators works the opposite way, this means the when the tank is empty the indicator shows full and when the tank is full the indicator shows empty. This also affects the remaining kilometre indicator, after filling the tank the car tells you to stop and fill the tank, when the tank is empty the call tell you you can run another 1.000 km. After about 800km in this situation I decided it was time to try a software update.
The software update is easy but has some tricky point, one is the decode of the CEM unit of the car, than you have to run the software with the old display installed, so the software can read the old settings, afterward you swap the display and run the software again. The second run updates the setting of the TFT unit, you also see that the display turns on and off several times. In my case the procedure ended with an error. As final result the fuel indicator worked fine the TPMS like was still on. Contacting the guys of D5T5 didn’t help much, they were very nice in their first answers, but from their point of view the procedure ended correctly so after the first answer they stopped to answer at all. To solve the TPMS issue i opened the display and put some black tape on the light below the black dash mask. Works fine.
To summarize, changing the analogue dashboard with the new TFT is pretty simple, requires 30-60 minutes depending on your skills. installing it without any software update works with two limitations: TPMS shows red light since the older car don’t have TPMS, fuel indicator works the wrong way. The software update procedure from VDASH (https://d5t5.com/sw/vdash.exe) is somehow buggy and there is a risk it doesn’t end correctly. The overall cost is of about 270 €, 70€ to buy a used TFT dashborad, 50 € for the shipping, 150 € for the software update.
