Here is a simple guide to opening the gear box cover in a Tivoli compact SUV.
Background
I drive a Tivoli. I bought it here in Korea about 5 or 6 years ago. It was relatively cheap and does what I need it to do. But one problem I've had several times is accidentally poking out the gear box indicator lights on the middle console. I'm talking about the little P-R-N-D indicator lights along the side of the gear shifter. They are in one piece attached up under the console box and either due to my bad luck or some low quality design, they have popped down in more than a few times now.
The first time I went ahead and took it to a local shop because I had some other things I wanted taken care of all at once (including a pretty sizable door ding I had been embarrassingly driving around with). The second time I just waited until the routine maintenance checkup and pointed it out to them. Not like it was impossible to drive with the lamp thing dangling there. But by the third time, I decided I'd had enough. I'm going to fix this myself.
I first tried searching in English, knowing that Tivoli are sold at least in some European markets. No luck. So I went searching in Korean on Naver and found a very nice blog that detailed this process step-by-step. I figured if anyone else (either in Korea or another country) has this issue, or any other issue needed to open and remove the gear box. cover, then I would go ahead and share some of that information here in English.
Also for myself, to remember this process the next time I inevitably poke it through again.
Removing the Tivoli gear box
Step 1 - remove the gear shifter head
Take off the bulky gear shift head. There is a small flap of rubber covering a screw at the front. Pull the flap off. It will hang there at the bottom. Take out the screw and pull off the shifter head.
Step 2 - Pry up the gear box console cover
Use some tool to gently but firmly pry up the covering of the box. You'll want to remove the whole piece, including the tray and the cigarette lighter power socket. Don't try to remove just the gear shifter section.
I used my favorite tool for prying things up: a vertical blind bracket, as seen here.
But any flat head screw driver will work.
The cover is connected by 7 pry points (3 on each side, 1 at the front farthest from the dashboard). Pry at those points to unsnap the cover.
You can see the pry points there: those white triangle things.
Step 3 - disconnect the cover from the dash
Finally, the whole cover will be connected by a white multi-pin connector. Just press the small white release button on the connector to snap the two white connectors apart.
Now you can pull out the entire cover assembly.
Step 4 (for me) - Reattach the fallen indicators
In the example from the guy's blog post, he was adding some special features (a 2nd USB power outlet). For me, I needed to fix the fallen indicator lamps. They were still attached by wire of course. Here they were on mine, dangling there.
I could see why this had happened 3 times already. The screws holding them are driven into plastic. Not the strongest but what do you expect. It looked like they had been just glued (not strongly apparently) back in rather than replacing the whole cover from some stripped screw holders.
So I just used my own hot glue to coat most of the attachment points. Hey, it saved me some cash. And it works for now.
The takeaway is that now I can redo this myself if it ever happens again. And now you can too.
Images other than my own are all taken from this source post:
🔗 티볼리 에어에 추가 12V 파워 아울렛(시거잭)을 달아보자
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