Garmin and Kenwood team up to market nav-enabled car stereos

Although Kenwood’s been shipping nav-enabled car stereos powered by Garmin since 2006, they’ve mostly gone under the radar — but now it looks like the two companies are so pleased with the arrangement that they’re going to launch a combined marketing blitz and some new jointly-developed models. We’ve already seen a couple nifty Kenwood stereos with build in Nav. (and some sweet consepts), but it looks like 2008 will bring even more units like the Garmin-powered Excelon DNX-8120 (pictured above) that launched at CES. All the new units are to have touchscreens with flash-based Garmin nav internals, as well as the usual high-end Kenwood features like Bluetooth, satellite radio, HD Radio, and iPod hookups. No new model numbers or prices have been announced yet, but the marketing partnership is apparently already underway — get ready for the car stereo section of your local big box to be taken over.