Trailer Wiring Harness Installation - 2006 Toyota RAV4

Installation of a Trailer Wiring Harness on a 2006 Toyota RAV4

Today on this 2006 Toyota RAV4, we are going to be installing wiring harness part number 118412. We are going to start off in the rear cargo area of our RAV4. The ports that we are looking for are located inside the vehicle here, behind both the driver and passenger side panels, basically directly behind the taillight assemblies. So we are going to go ahead and need to remove a few items to gain access to these ports. We are going to start by removing the floor board, along with the cargo area. And then we will be able to pull back the panels and gain access to the plugs. Next I am going to go ahead and pull out the rear threshold piece. And to do that we are just going to need to release the mounting clips that are holding it into place on the top side here. We will be using a basic rivet removal tool and pry up gently to release the clips. With those released, we just want to come to the bottom of it here and we are actually going to lift straight up. Next we will move on to the interior panel and there are a couple of fasteners that are holding it into place, as well as the clips that we had on the rear threshold section. We have the tie-down bolt right here, a second one here, and a regular screw in this recessed hole here. So we want to go ahead and remove all of those and we will go ahead and pull our panel back. We will do that on both the driver and passenger side. 1:20

Then with the fasteners removed, we are going to go ahead and again take the rivet tool and along the rear edge here release the clips. You can see, we still cannot get the panel fully off and that is because the seat release up here is still kind of holding it in position. But, if you look through the cargo opening here, actually plugged into the back of the taillight itself is the connector we are looking for for our wiring harness. So from there, we can go ahead and take our wiring harness and start plugging it in-line. Over here on the driver side we are going to be plugging in the port that has the yellow and brown wires on them. And basically we are just going to be plugging it in-line to the two connectors that we had just separated off of the back side of the taillight. You will also notice here that we have a white wire with a ring terminal on it. And this is our ground wire. We are going to need to secure that to a metal surface in this cargo are as well. 2:23

OK, if we continue down our harness here, you can see we have our red wire that is open ended. We are going to take the large lead of black wire and connect it to this wire. To make that connection, we are going to be using the provided butt-connector. And you can see the red wire has a little bit of the jacketing striped off, go ahead and do the same thing for the black wire. And crimp that connection down. I am just going to take a little bit of electrical tape and tape up that connection. And then next we need to find a way to get this wire underneath the vehicle. If you look here through the cargo door again, on the back wall there is a grommet there. What we are going to do is just poke a little hole in that. Use that as our point to feed the wire through and get it below the vehicle. And then finally on the driver side here, we are going to take and mount the modulite box. And if you look on the back side, it has double-sided tape. We are just going to go ahead and adhere that into the backside here in the vehicle. And next we will take and route the passenger side connector underneath the interior panel here where we are going to take it over to the other connector on the passenger side and plug it in to the backside of the taillight, just like we did on the driver side. 3:49

With the passenger side port connected, we can go ahead and put the passenger side interior panel back on, as well as the middle threshold piece and the cargo flooring. And we will continue underneath the vehicle where we will route our wire out to the battery. When routing the wire up to the front, you just want to make sure that you avoid any possible hot spots or pinch points that could damage the wire. I have routed it up to underneath the engine compartment and what I have done previously was to take a light gage piece of wire and actually fed it up from the battery area, down underneath the vehicle, so that when I get to this point, I can just take and tape my wire to it and use it to pull it up in through the engine compartment. And that makes it much easier. OK, you can see now we have the wire routed all of the way to the positive terminal of the battery. So it is time to go ahead and make our connection there. What we are going to do is take the fuse holder which is provided with the installation kit and we are going to take this loop of wire and actually cut it in half. To the one end we are going to add the butt-connector which we are going to connect to the black wire. The other end, we are going to add the ring terminal which is going to connect to the positive side of the battery. 5:01

With those connectors on, I am actually next going to go ahead and take and connect the fuse holder to the battery before I actually connect it to the black wire. And that is going to help us determine how much length of the black wire we actually need. And you can see here, I have some extra black wire so I am just going to cut back the length. Go ahead and strip back some of the jacketing, connect it to the fuse holder and again, with like any connection, you want to go ahead and put a little electrical tape around it. Finally, you just want to go ahead and add the fuse to the fuse holder and our installation will be complete. And with that, that will conclude the installation of wiring harness part number 118412.