2010 Nissan Versa Stereo Wiring

My fiancé has a base model Nissan Versa, and she spends a lot of time on the road with it for work. I wanted to give her the gift of hands-free calling too. I am not a fan of the user interface on my own Sony receiver, so I decided to mix it up a little. Here's what I bought:

• Pioneer Bluetooth Receiver with Android/iPhone/iPod Control, Front USB & Aux (FH-X721BT) [BestBuy]
• Metra Stereo Cable Harness (70-7552) [Amazon]
• Metra Radio Antenna Adapter (40-NI12) [Amazon]

This car doesn't have a standard barrel-style antenna connector, so you need an adapter. You will notice the antenna adapter cable also has a fun blue wire of ambiguous purpose. It's actually super important - it's used to turn on the car's antenna amplifier. Apparently without it you will get garbage reception.

The other note is that the harness wasn't a perfect pin-match for the cabling. I took out the thicker brown wire on the one side (as it wasn't going to connect to anything in the car) and I moved/re-purposed the useless blue/white wire on the harness (antenna amp trigger - which in this situation is provided by the antenna adapter) to be the ground wire (black wire from the car, which had no wire connected on the harness. I could have just grounded the stereo on the chassis, but I discovered this dashboard has a ton of plastic, and not a lot of reachable chassis connections.

The receiver comes with it's own cable, and you can either choose to snip off the existing connector in the car, or you can buy a car-specific cable harness. I decided I really did not want to jam my hands into the dashboard, stripping and soldering cables in a confined space. I also liked the idea of being able to swap the stock stereo back in later. 

Some investigation online, followed by careful testing, yielded the following wire mapping:

Connection	Car	Harness	Receiver
Car Radio Battery Constant 12v+ Wire	Brown	Yellow	Yellow
Car Radio Accessory Switched 12v+ Wire	Light Green	Red	Red
Car Radio Ground Wire	Black	Blue/White (Repurposed)	Black
Car Radio Illumination Wire	Orange	Orange	Orange/White
Left Front Speaker Positive Wire (+)	White	White	White
Left Front Speaker Negative Wire (-)	Brown	White/Black	White/Black
Right Front Speaker Positive Wire (+)	Green	Grey	Grey
Right Front Speaker Negative Wire (-)	Light Blue	Grey/Black	Grey/Black
Left Rear Speaker Positive Wire (+)	Violet	Green	Green
Left Rear Speaker Negative Wire (-)	Red	Green/Black	Green/Black
Right Rear Speaker Positive Wire (+)	Light Green	Violet	Violet
Right Rear Speaker Negative Wire (-)	Gray	Violet/Black	Violet/Black
Antenna Amp		Blue	Blue/White

It is super easy to access the stereo in the Versa (compared to my Sonata). It's also way easier to find instructions!

Here are some photos I grabbed to verify the wire mapping





Testing out the wire-mapping

I immediately noticed the sound was phenomenally better with this unit. The stock stereo must not be very good (I noticed a bit of an improvement with my stereo upgrade, but nothing like this).

To test that you have the right speakers wired, you can just start playing the radio, and in the stereo settings play with the fader and balance to force sound to the front/rear and left/right.

My final cable


All done!

Hope this is useful to someone out there!