On the Rover FB groups an upgrade was "promoted" by an installer and others chimed in showing the direct source from Aliexpress for these really neat CarPlay / Android Auto upgrades that replace the original Nav display unit. These are not super new per say, but it *seemed* like having the 4x4 Display integrated into these was. Turns out that has been around for a little while now too. But here is how mine went and why it was sent back.

Either way with Black Friday deals abound I picked one up for about $40 under retail, shipped for $219. There are several to pick and you need to make sure to get the right ones if you want the 4x4 info. So you want specific seller/make and model. I picked up AC8581L.





It arrived after a few weeks from China. Packed okay, nothing special. TONS of cables in the box. I wont really cover much of the install. It is pretty dang easy. You need to close off the MOST network and just plug a few things in. None of your NAV unit cables are used, so there is a really good chance this can be added to an LR3 that never came with a nav unit. The main harness simply plugs inbetween the large harness for the radio head unit. Then you just need the swap the antenna over. After that any cables are direct to the CarPlay unit itself. There was no splicing or connecting any individual wires that came with the harness.

When working, the system will wake up when the ignition key is inserted. You do not even have to turn it. This is also when I learned the LR3 has key sense, did not know. Figured it needed to be turned to wake up systems. Anyway.... It can be configured to sleep or shutdown when the Rover turns off. If you let it sleep it will instantly wake up. If you set it to shutdown it will have to boot up each time, similar to the factory nav units. This is where you can install a custom startup screen if you want, like I did.




The mounting bracket is crap. VERY thing metal and it does NOT match up very well. But being so thin you can bend it to get the unit to fit really well, well well enough. On the dash itself there is a bit of a notch on the underside. So if you get the top edge of the unit into that spot it fits pretty well. There were still gaps at the bottom tho which you can see in this pic. Some more fudging may have got it to fit better but I did not try.




The software is not bad but a bit clunky. If you just stick to CarPlay or Android Auto then no worries. But there is a huge suite of native apps for navigation, etc. If you install a data sim, it can use that network for navigation. Basically you do not need a phone for this, you can have a very robust system with its own data plan if you want. I think you can even use Google Maps natively on the unit. This does require the GPS antenna along with a 4G antenna to be installed in the dash some place. I put mine in some hidden spots and while I did not use data, the GPS was happy hiding under the dash. It did not have to be out on top to get signal.

So one feature of this was the 4x4 info screen as mentioned. Mine was a bit.... weird? The rear diff did not show up, the HDC icon was in a weird spot, the front wheels were spread out wider than the rears and the heights were odd looking.... But it did work. There is a terrain mode section too, just like the native display. But I noticed if you went into a special terrain mode then back to standard, it never sad "auto" mode again like it first would show. But it was fast to show any changes made. And the front wheels turned to show wheel direction! I dont think the factory display do that, at least not that I recall.



There are some other features that were REALLY neat. My rear aftermarket cam died, but if installed it would show you not only the video but overlay grid that bent with steering like later Rover systems with factory cameras. Not only that, but it shows your parking sensors too! I dont have a screen shot, but the display will even show exactly which door is open including rear hatch. No matter which screen is up, it will overlay a generic vehicle and show the door in an open position in yellow. Once the door is closed, the overlay disappears.





I am sure I am forgetting some other interesting bits. But now for why I shipped it back...... There were some issues I could easily overlook. The mounting bracket, eh... okay. Bend to fit. But the display was not very bright. My upgraded LR4 nav display I put in was much brighter and with my Arduino custom module controlling brightness it was perfect at night. This unit... not so much. If you went into factory setting to sorta "over drive" the display the white would blast out and color would wash. Then at night it was too bright. There needs to be more setting to control the display but it really just needs a much better one, a brighter one. But that I could live with too. Wireless CarPlay.... nope. Will not work at all. Not a huge deal since I just used USB to connect instead and that way my iPhone was charging anyway. So once again, I can live with that.

But one day I was driving and the music stopped and the display went off. Oddly my phone was still charging, so the unit was still getting power. Got home, restarted truck and display came on. Ah... a fluke! Nope, the display would now not turn off at all. I did several factory resets on the unit, removed all but the very basic wires, left it unplugged from everything for days - nothing worked to get it to go into sleep mode/power down when the truck went off. Well, one thing worked. It comes with a small CanBUD decoder. If I unplugged that it would go to sleep. I contact the seller and they tried to help a little. There is suppose to be a CanBUS app but it was not installed on mine. He insisted it was on every unit tho. Apparently that app must be able to rescan the bus and should have got my rear diff to show up. And while he did not say it, I think *maybe* it would have gotten my unit to recognize the key sense again or accessory power to know when to sleep again. Without the app installed though, I had no way to try things. At this point that is all I really wanted, just for it to sleep again when the truck was off. Seller never did offer up exchange by the way.

This is the vid the seller sent showing the rear diff being displayed in an LR3:

 

darn - looked promising
I wonder if you got a unit with the CanBUS app installed, you would have kept it

 

If the app could have refreshed things in some way to make it work, I would have. Assuming the CanBus was the issue. Everything else over the bus kept working though, such as 4x4 info, door open, steering angle, steering controls, etc. So I am not 100% sure the app would have fixed it.

 

Thats a shame, i assume it didn't come with a separate canbus decoder ? I didn't have sat nav or 4x4 info but the harness kit i bought came with a canbus decoder that made everything work but there are extra features that should be supported like the door open notification, no information on how to set it up in the head unit settings.

 

It did come with one specific to the Disco 3. I did find them sold separate and if I had been well past warranty on the unit, I probably would have bought one in hopes it would have helped. With that said, had I not had an issue I would not have been aware of this CanBus app that should have been installed and was missing. Disconnecting just that would put the unit to sleep, but I am not sure if that was the actual issue. Mentioned to the seller but they did not really respond to that info. In fact most responses were usually delayed by a couple days or more. I had a return window to meet, which is also why I shipped it back. Had the seller communicated faster and given me some sorta resolution I would have kept it.

Its devices like this that make me wish I knew how to program modern stuff. I would love to dig inside something like this and put in proper Rover graphics. Also the 4x4 screen required a a couple steps to bring up, it was not a "widget" like some apps. With the apps that are widgets one could put them right on the main screen. Like below you can have a clock, speed indicator, radio control, etc. I would totally find a way to make the 4x4 one of those and even show a couple function live like which terrain mode is selected and high/low - like a mini 4x4 screen which when pressed would bring up the full one.

 

So not all of these are made the same. I suppose that is expected. I did return because the seller just seemed to not understand the issue, as simple as it was. Again, it would simply not turn off even when the truck was off. No matter how many device wipes/resets, etc. I still think it was that CAN bus module that somehow was at fault. After the return/refund I did want to order another but some political issues brought an end to shipping form China. And since then XONRICH stopped all shipping to the US via their Aliexpress store.

What I can say is I did like the unit itself for the most part. It was far from perfect but the biggest issue was screen brightness and it seems with these there is no way around that. While hardware, like the CPU and RAM, may be different across models the baseline unit I am pretty sure it identical across all makes/models/sellers.

With that said I have been sick of the hole in my dash so now that things have settled, I ordered another one from another seller. And this is why I say they are not all the same. It appears that the software these are built around are very CPU centric. The XONRICH I bought came with an 8581 processor and thus a set of software and behavior that is essentially tailored to that. The second unit, from Sadocom (Alixpress again), came with a different processor - an 8667 - and therefore a different set of system software. I am not sure why all the software can not be the same. But I ran into some issues.

• USB for CarPlay did not work. The irony being with the XONRICH unit that was ALL that would work with my phone, just USB no wireless. Which was, at the time, annoying at most but whatever. Now the thing is I have Starlink on my LR3 and since the unit from Sadocom will not work at all over USB, I had to use WiFi (initial connect over BT, Wifi for the streaming data). That meant that both the CarPlay unit and my phone could not access Starlink while listening to media. Go figure!
• Screen brightness control was a big issue with this second unit from Sadocom. The first unit could use time or a second setting I think for maybe a sensor or something. But it worked. With this second unit, nope. It read the CAN bus and if headlights came on, it dimmed to night mode. Headlights off, full brightness (or whatever value was set for full brightness). But I drive with my lights on all the time, so the display was always dim and in daylight that sucked! If I turned off the auto setting, it was at full brightness all the time even at night. The only work around was to play with the settings all the time. I hated it.
• Audio volume is weak - as expected when using the AUX input - I mean it was not bad... I just wanted a bit more! With the XONRICH unit there was a factory setting menu that let me set the minimum default output volume. Basically the units can output louder than a phone, etc. The default volume is in the middle. And with the XONRICH one can change the default and it will stick. So bump it up a few notches and that was it. With the second unit there was not default to set. So every single time I started the truck it would default to the middle volume - which again is basically full volume. But I liked being able to boost it, set it and always have that extra headroom with sound and not have to touch any settings.
• Audio glitch. I did not mention this to the seller but for some reason the audio would drop every 45 seconds or so, mainly when my phone was also navigating or something. Not sure why, could be my phone. It is an old iPhone 11 Pro.

So I will return this second one. Screen shot of what I bought below.

But I do plan to order yet another! Once this return is on the way I looked into a third.... I know. But I tell ya what, if you ignore the issue the actual integration is really nice. So I contacted a seller and quickly explained the issues and they claim I will not have them. Basically it seems like it will be the same as the first bought but with better specs. The CPU will be a 7862a which is all but the best one can find for these niche market Disco 3 CarPlay models and benchmarks very well. If the units works well without the annoying issues I may check out see forums. Apparently there is a lot one can do with these if they really dig into them. That includes display swaps. So I may see if there is a better, brighter display I can swap into it and some software changes I can make to give more levels to brightness control. Or I may even adapt my LR4 nav unit controller to this display. We shall see.

 

Please keep us up to date with a final solution

 

Thank you for being a bit of a tester on this, I'm really interested in what you find out with the other unit you are looking at. I saw this link on discoweb where someone retrofitted a similar unit into the stock nav bezel, but it doesn't integrate into the canbus. https://discoweb.org/index.php?threa...or-lr3.101790/. Please keep us posted and if you can share a link to the new unit that would be great as well.

 

Small update. The third unit arrived. This is much more like the first I received when it comes to the software. For example you have to enter a password and go into factory settings to change the theme style. And the backlight will either read the headlights being on or off, or it can be time based but the times are hard coded so not ideal with how much a shift there is between summer and winter where I live. I really wish they would just read the can bus data and go off that like the old display. They certainly access a lot of other can bus data like parking sensors and steering. With that said, I did like the software on the second on overall all much better. Just a better interface design. This one, like the first, is rougher in appearance. I wish I had taken more pics of the second one in action.

The third one does have one nifty setting that I dont think the first had. Def not the second. You can set a startup app. It is not perfect, but it does let one set the 4x4 info for startup BUT the apps are so stupid. Again, just poor design. So while the app may launch and display you only end up with three icons and still have to press the 4x4 info to get that display. The other two icons being setting and something else.

There are some forums that I may have to join and dive into. People do hack and modify these. I would love to get my hands on the 4x4 app from the second unit. It was more elegant and actually showed the rear locker. Like the first one this one does not. And with the first one the seller insisted there can some phantom Can Bus app I could open that would maybe fix that issue. But now I am far, far more familiar with these so maybe I can figure it out on my own. One BIG thing I learned is that in the "vehicle selection" area of the factory settings when you select different vehicles certain apps appear or disappear. For example with this third unit there was no 4x4 app at all to be found, called Vehicle Info, until I manually selected Land Rover. Unlike the last two that was set already - I assume by the seller/factory or such - but this one was not. So none of the can bus based functioned worked at all until I selected a Land Rover. But there is no Discovery option, just Range Rover.

 

Thank you for the update. So if I wanted to get one of these primarily for Apple Carplay functionality, knowing that I can also still access the 4x4 screen info on rare occasion, which would you recommend? I am currently looking at the model below, but for the 4gb model pricing is up to $310 plus $22 shipping...getting pricy for these android units.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/32568...yAdapt=glo2usa