Add Navigation To Your Escape's MyFord Touch On The Cheap

If you have a Ford Escape with MyFord Touch interface, you've probably noticed that there's an option for navigation. Unfortunately, if your SUV didn't come with that feature, it'll cost a fair bit to enable it. The price is somewhere around $900, which is a lot to add simple navigation to a device. But one person has found a clever way of getting around that.

It should go without saying that this modification will void most warranties that you have on your vehicle. So if yours is still under warranty for a while, it might not be a good idea. But if you don't mind throwing caution into the wind for the sake of convenience and saving several hundred bucks, then this is for you.

What's interesting is that the navigation feature is something that is simply unlocked, rather than a component that gets installed. So the trick is to find an APIM that has the navigation feature already unlocked. According to the user that posted the instructions, you can find these on ebay and other sites for around $120. You just have to make sure that the one you get already has these features unlocked. You can generally do this by identifying the VIN that the APIM came out of, and matching it up with the exact model of Escape, and the features it came with.

Once you've managed to find and purchase your APIM, you'll just need to disconnect the battery, remove the trim around the screen, then remove the screen and the existing APIM. Then just replace it with the newly-acquired one, and put it all back together.

The video above explains how to do things in pretty good detail, but for complete instructions and some further information, you can see this post on the Ford Escape forums.