Installing Monitors in the Cayenne’s Rear Seats

For the first time in our Cayenne, we installed monitors in the rear seats. Actually, my husband had been suggesting for a while, “Why don’t we put monitors in the back seats for the kids?” but I had a strange stubbornness about it and kept refusing, saying:

No, no, we shouldn’t spoil the kids like that. Watching TV in the car shouldn’t become the norm.

So, until now, we hadn’t installed any.

However, as the kids grew older and we started taking long road trips as a family, the kids would get bored in the car and start complaining with things like “I’m hungry” or “My back hurts”, and often they’d start fighting with each other. Managing all that while driving was quite challenging, so this time we decided to have monitors installed in the rear seats as an aftermarket option.

Of course, these monitors allow the kids to watch TV in the back, but my husband said:

The kids rarely watch regular TV and mostly watch YouTube, so I actually want to connect an Amazon Fire TV Stick so they can watch YouTube. That’s why I asked the dealer to make sure we could connect an HDMI port no matter what. With HDMI, we can also connect an iPhone and mirror the screen, so it’s really useful.

That was his main insistence: to have an HDMI port available.

If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can watch movies and dramas on Amazon Prime Video using your Fire TV Stick, and of course, YouTube as well. The Fire TV Stick is small and portable, so for example, you can plug it into the HDMI port of a hotel TV while traveling and watch Amazon Prime. My husband always keeps a Fire TV Stick in his suitcase just for trips.

By the way, when I gave birth to our third child recently, due to COVID-19 restrictions, no visitors were allowed during my hospital stay, and the midwives took care of the baby whenever needed. The hospital had told me in advance, “You’ll have a lot of free time during your stay (laughs),” so I brought the Fire TV Stick with me.

It turned out to be a great idea because I was really bored and managed to watch 7 or 8 movies on Amazon Prime during my stay. I’m so glad I brought it!

Anyway, back to the topic: my husband’s main request was to be able to use the Fire TV Stick in the Cayenne, so the dealer installed the HDMI port as an option.

How to Use It

Here’s how to actually watch Amazon Prime or YouTube inside the car:

1. Connect the HDMI cable (the cable was routed to the center console).
Power is supplied via USB-C in the center console (all USB ports in the Cayenne are USB-C). We use Porsche Connect’s 3GB/month data plan for Wi-Fi. If we run out of data, we plan to use smartphone tethering.

2. Press and hold the “NAVI” button (this switches the screen to TV mode first).

3. Press and hold the “NAVI” button again (this switches to HDMI input).

4. Press the “SOURCE” button and select the corresponding FM radio frequency to get sound (the radio setting outputs sound; the monitor itself doesn’t have speakers. My husband thinks this is because the digital signal from terrestrial TV or HDMI is converted to analog to display on the monitor).

5. Use the Fire TV Stick remote to control the screen (our kids operate it from the back seats).

Following these steps, the kids can freely watch YouTube and more in the rear seats.

In practice, the kids love it so much that during a recent short drive, they said, “We want to ride longer!” The Cayenne’s rear seats are spacious, so they can watch the monitor from a good distance without getting motion sickness. Also, while the kids watch YouTube in the back, adults in the front seats can still use the front monitor for navigation or other purposes.

If the sound gets too loud, you can set the audio to mainly come from the rear seats, making the front seats relatively quiet so adults can enjoy conversation.

Honestly, now that it’s this comfortable, I wish I had installed this in our previous Panamera too… (laughs)