Rear View Camera System Installation - 2004 Toyota Highlander

Installation of a Rear View Camera System on a 2004 Toyota Highlander

Today we are going to be installing the rear view camera system part number HM60195VA on a 2004 Toyota Highlander. Our back up camera has three basic components to it. We have got the license plate mount which has both the backup camera and the two backup sensors built into it as well. We have got the monitor which we are going to mount inside the dash area. We are actually going to tap these wires into the behind the tail light assembly. The red wire will mount into the reverse lead, the black wire is a ground, you will tap that into a ground wire. Okay, we are inside the vehicle here and taking a look at the dashboard we are going to kind of point out a couple of common areas where we can mount our monitor. See again inside the kit there is 3M double sided tape. We are going to tape that to the bottom here.

You are going to want it to be directly in the middle kind of angled toward the driver so you can see what you are doing there. Or you can even put it off to the side here and you can also go directly above the steering wheel. I think for our purposes here we are actually going to go ahead and mount it over here on the side and that is going to allow us to route our wire out through the threshold here and down below. Before we adhere the 3M double sided tape, you want to make sure that you clean out the area thoroughly with soapy water or even a light solvent. Okay we are at the back, at the tail gate now. And our license plate mount should be mounting on just like so.

And you can see our tail light assemblies are external through the tail gate so we are going to need to find a way to get our wire connected to the extension and inside behind the tail light assemblies so we can make our connection to the reverse lead and the ground. The easiest way to do that is going to be for us to drill a hole up in through beneath here into the inside of the tail gate. From there we can route it up and pass it into the inside of the vehicle. As you can see we have got a couple of lights in the way so we are going to need to pull those out and also take off the back side of the tail gate itself to insure that we are going to be drilling in the right spot. I am going to loosen the windshield wiper motor here to gain a little bit more access to the area we are going to try to drill our hole. Now that we have cleared out a path from the inside I am going to go ahead and drill my hole through. I am going to go ahead and feed the wire through off of the license plate camera. I am actually going to add a grommet to that hole as well. What I am going to do is just slide it over the wire there, feeding that through. Okay, then back inside the tail gate now we have got our wire routed through, I am going to go ahead and put the motor back on.

And next we are going to take our long harness. You want to go ahead and tape the connection to insure that it does not come apart. We are going to actually route it along this wiring harness here all the way to the front side of the tail gate. All right now that I have got all of the wires zip tied up to the harness I am going to go ahead and pass the wires down through behind the weather stripping here. To insure that the wires do not get pinched at any point we are actually going to pull the weather stripping back and take my grinder and just grind down a little section so that the wires can sit inside that groove. Okay I am going to further pull that back. And at this point we are going to need again get these wires in behind this section here down to where we need to tap in behind the tail light assembly. This may require you to remove some of the internal panels to gain proper access. We may need to pop this one back a little bit. And see if we open up this door here that gives us access to the wires that we are going to need. But we are also going to need to come behind this panel here too. Which may require us popping back a few more of the push rivets there and there is also a screw right here that is holding it in. Okay, we have now got our wires routed through behind the tail light assembly. And through testing we have determined that pink wire is our reverse wire that we are looking for. And the white with the black stripe is our ground. I am going to go ahead and just cut down the length of the wire here.

And we will go ahead and connect our wires using this red scotch lock. How that works is that you put the wire that you are connected to into the first set of grooves and then we put the connecting wire into the second set . And we just take a pair of pliers and crimp that down. And that makes our connection for us. Okay with my connections made I can go ahead and plug my harness back into the back of the tail light. Once we finalize everything and insured that it is all working properly we will go ahead and tape these up. I am going to leave them loose for the time being just in case we have to make any changes or if for some reason these did not seat in properly. To help gain access behind the interior trim panel I am going to go ahead and remove the components here at the rear to get those out of the way. Also remove the two interior push pins here and release the screws in the inside of the compartment which is going to allow me to pull these up. With the wire routed up that far I can go ahead and reassemble the cargo area. Okay next we are going to remove the kick plate here behind the driver side in the rear. There are just push pins in there holding it in. And we are just going to feed that along the existing wiring harness. Take some zip ties and attach the wiring harness to the main bundle here. And I am just going to slide it under where the seatbelt goes, and we will feed it up to the other kick plate. Okay now that I have got the wire ran all the way up to the front side underneath the dash we just want to go ahead and you can see how pulled away the weather stripping off of the inboard piece here. We want to connect both ends together. Go ahead and tape that up. We are just going to feed our connector back behind the paneling here along with the rest of the excess wires. Okay now that we have got the excess wire routed behind the paneling here and down underneath here, we can go ahead and put the weather stripping back on and we can go ahead and put our kick plates back on after that. Okay, and we want to quick test that. Just put the keys in and put the vehicle in reverse, and the unit is working just fine. So we can finish putting together all of the components in the cargo area along with the cargo door. Secure any loose wires that you may have and your installation will be complete. This will conclude the installation of the rear view camera system part number HM60195VA on a 2004 Toyota Highlander.

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