To see if this custom-fit item will work for you please tell us what vehicle you'll use it with.
The Tekonsha P3 is a brake controller beloved for its reliability and useability. You're able to save your settings and multiple profiles. It's easy to install, and with the custom harness, it's plug-and-play.
Features:
Specs:
Braking output is the maximum amount of power that will be applied to your trailer's brakes. How much braking output you need is determined by the weight of your trailer; a heavier trailer will need more power to bring it to a stop. You want to go as high as you can without the trailer brakes locking up.
Use the arrow buttons on the front of the module to set the output.
The boost setting controls the aggressiveness of your trailer's braking, meaning how quickly the brakes reach the maximum braking level. If your vehicle takes too long to come to a stop, increase the setting. If it stops too abruptly, decrease the setting.
Depending on the level of boost, your trailer brakes can start at either 13 percent or 25 percent of the set braking output. So instead of starting at 0, the brakes will start at 25 percent and get to 100 percent sooner. This keeps the trailer from pushing your tow vehicle forward.
Boost Levels:
| Approximate Gross Trailer Weight | Boost Level | Increase in Initial Power Output |
|---|---|---|
| Less than tow vehicle GVW | B1 | 13% |
| Equal to tow vehicle GVW | B1 or B2 | 13% or 25% |
| Up to 25% more than tow vehicle GVW | B2 or B3* | 25% |
| Up to 40% more than tow vehicle GVW | B3* | 25% |
*Both B2 and B3 offer a 25-percent boost in initial power. But the braking curve for B3 is more aggressive than that of B2. This means that, even though you will start out with the same intensity when using these boost levels, you will get an overall more aggressive braking experience with the higher level. So if you use B3, you will reach maximum braking sooner than if you use B2.
To engage the manual override, twist the rotary-style lever from right to left. This will activate the trailer's brakes and brake lights independently of your vehicle, great for stopping sway or controlling your trailer's momentum in an emergency.
The P3 is able to store your settings in multiple profiles so that you can have them ready to go for different trailers and drivers. Even the display is super customizable: you can change the screen color, brightness, and language to make it easy to use.
The P3 makes it easy to troubleshoot problems as they come up, with comprehensible and detailed diagnostics displayed on the screen.
Diagnostic troubleshooting messages include:
Diagnostic warning signs include:
The Prodigy P3 offers advanced safety features to prevent damage to various components of your towing setup.
-Integrated reverse battery protection shields the brake controller and your trailer's breakaway system from shorts.
-When the P3 is not in use, it draws only 3.6 milliamps, minimizing drain on your vehicle's battery.
-Any time your vehicle and trailer are at a standstill with the brakes applied for more than 5 seconds, the hold feature will kick on and reduce power to just 25 percent. This will keep your trailer in place without your brakes overheating.
Installing the P3 is incredibly simple. You'll mount the bracket to your dashboard then mount the unit to the bracket. Plug the custom harness into your vehicle and into the unit. Done!
Keep in mind that the P3 must be horizontally level and parallel with the direction of travel to work correctly.
With a replacement wiring harness (sold separately) and replacement bracket (TK5906 - sold separately), you can even transfer the Prodigy P3 to another vehicle.
Note: If you don't already have a 7-way plug at the back of your vehicle, take a look at our exclusive 7- and 4-way brake controller installation kit (ETBC7 - sold separately).
Proportional braking means that your trailer brakes mimic your tow vehicle's brakes. If you slam on the brakes, your trailer brakes will activate with the same intensity; if you brake lightly, your trailer brakes lightly too. The trailer's braking is in proportion to your vehicle and trailer.
The Prodigy P3 uses an internal inertia sensor to detect how your vehicle is braking so it can send the right amount of braking power to your trailer. It measures the inertia of your tow vehicle and activates the trailer's brakes to slow at the same rate. The result is uniform braking across your towing setup. No push-pull action - just smooth, proportional braking every time.
California residents: click here
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Instructor Hi there, Colorado owners. Today on your 2022 Chevrolet Colorado we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Tekonsha's P3 proportional trailer brake controller. What's nice about these proportional brake controllers is you get a much more natural braking, 'cuz when you hit the brake pedal it detects that your vehicle is, it can feel that move in, and then the slowing down movement. The inertia sensor detects that and it uses that to determine how intense to apply the brakes to help match your vehicle. You do still have your options for setting your power. We've got a maximum being 14, and then you can go all the way down with it.
The higher the power is set, the stronger the brakes will apply. We also have a boost here, which helps to engage the brakes a little bit, a little bit more quickly, a little bit stronger. The boost setting here has three levels and you can turn it off. Boost one is for when you have a trailer that is less than your vehicle or close to its weight. Boost two is for when you have a trailer that's similar in weight to your vehicle, maybe slightly higher, and boost three is for when you have a trailer that weighs more than your vehicle.
Can help ramp up that output power to ensure that it does the job that you need it to, to match the vehicle that you're using to pull it with. On bottom right, you have your menu button here. You can change options for your display, if you wanted to do that. You got your brightness, color and contrast. You can see the X and the OK there.
So this would be select, and this top one is back. Go back into the menu. Brake type. That's really cool here for this Tekonsha P3. One of the new things a lot of people are doing with their trailers to get a shorter stopping distance with more natural braking is going to an electric over hydraulic disc brake setup.
And if we go in here, we can see you've got the option for electric or that hydraulic. So you got your options there for the various type of breaking systems. And there are a couple of more features in here that are a little bit hidden. You can find them in your manual. If you press both the menu and the boost button here at the same time and hold. This will bring up a trailer selection menu, where you can actually save trailer profiles. Oh, come on. This will bring up a trailer selection menu, where you can actually save trailer profiles, and you can have up to five different trailer profiles. That's really nice because maybe you've got a big camper that is electric over hydraulic, and you know you need the specific amount of brake put output for that trailer. You can set a profile for it. Maybe, let's say, you just got another trailer you use for work and it's got electric brakes and it's got different weight ratings. So you need to adjust the output to match that trailer and the style of brakes it has. You can easily set that up to another profile, so when you go to hook up to whatever trailer that you're used to using frequently, just select the proper profile from there, and that way you don't have to redo your settings every time when you're swapping to different trailers. The last option that we have here is our reverse mode, and this just kind of temporarily disables the output, so that way you can back up your trailer or whatever if you're having some issues with it. It's really nice for me to be backing a boat down a boat dock or something. We'll begin our installation here on the driver's side. We're right down here at the kick panel. There's the parking brake pedal. I'm gonna go ahead and push it down just to help make things a little bit easier to see. And this panel here we're gonna be removing. To remove the panel you're just simply gonna pull up on it. So your fingers should be able to grip underneath of it here. And kind of at this middle point here we're gonna pull up and we're gonna be working our way towards the back of the panel, pulling up on it. There we go. Once you get the back released and you get towards the front here, you're gonna kind of pivot it like this and pull away from the wall here, 'cuz you got a clip right there. And that'll pop out of there. And then we can just set this panel aside. Behind our panel, you're gonna find your factory brake controller wiring. And it's just taped right here. Cut the tape and that'll expose our wires there. We've got four wires here, and this'll hook into our brake controller. In our P3 that we've got here, it does come with a harness. This is the harness that it comes with here. It has four wires on it as well. So everything will just match right up to what we've got right here, so we can make our connections. Now for demonstration purposes today, we're not gonna be fully mounting it. We're gonna use some hook and loop fasteners to secure it. And we're not gonna be opening up the little hardware pack that it comes with. That way we can repackage that. So we're gonna strip back each one of these wires and hook them up. I like to do it one at a time, just because the red wire here is your hot wire. So once you strip it back, that wire's live there. So I kind like to get that hooked up right away to prevent it being stripped and potentially shorting out. So we're gonna go ahead and just take our, start with our red wire here. It has a green stripe on it. That's our main power wire. So we're just gonna strip it back. You may wanna trim a little bit off 'cuz it's got those little ends on it there. So we'll probably trim a little bit of this off and then strip it, just to make it easier to strip with that material that it had on there. So give it a little twist, makes it slide into the butt connectors more easily. We'll slide our butt connector on there and then we'll attach our wire to it. We can now hook this up to the appropriate wire here on our new harness. That's gonna be the black wire on our harness to power up our module, our brake controller. So we'll slide that in the other end of our butt connector and make our connection. So now that we've got that connected there, we're just going to repeat that process to connect the rest of our wires. We'll be hooking the blue wire in our harness to the blue wire here on the vehicle. That's the output from the brake controller. So that'll send it down this wire to the back. The white wire here on our harness is ground, and that'll actually hook to the black wire here on our vehicle. That'll be our ground. And then the red wire here on our harness is for the brake signal input to the brake controller. So that's coming from your brake pedal here. So it lets the brake controller know when you're pressing the brake pedal, and that'll connect to the white wire with the small blue stripe on it there. So I'm gonna strip each one of these back and then make those connections and then you'll see those here. All right. So now that we've got all of our connections made here, I'm gonna reinstall this panel and kind of tuck my wiring out the top of it when I reinstall it, and we're gonna be mounting our brake controller roughly in this location here. It's kind of out of the way. Our wiring will reach it easily. Position it just off to the left so we can still access our hood release switch. And that is now fully reinstalled. We still have access to our wiring there to be able to mount our controller. Now, typically when you mount your controller, you're gonna screw the bracket straight into the dash. But again, for demonstration purposes, we're gonna be using some hook and loop fasteners just to stick it there, so that way we don't mess up the dash here. That is not really how you wanna leave your brake controller installed, 'cuz this is an inertia based controller, so it needs to detect vehicle movement. So it is important you screw it in place. We can now take our brake controller here and mount it up. We're just gonna line it up with the screws there and then install it. Line up with the screw holes. And then we'll use a quarter inch socket to run it down. All right, so now we got it mounted up. All that would be left is to plug it in. Our plug will simply just go right here into the back of the unit. The release tab you'll put facing up. Simply plugs in. Once we've got it plugged in, you can see instantly it powers up, 'cuz it's getting power from the vehicle, right from those powering ground wires that we showed you there. And right away, we're getting our indication that, "Hey, we don't have a trailer connected." So I'm gonna go ahead and grab the test box that we've got that'll simulate a trailer load, and we can run through the options and verify everything's working properly. All right. And we got our test box installed right there. And the first thing we see after plugging it into the 7-way at the back of the vehicle is that it no longer gives us that trailer not connected and that opening P3 screen. We've now got a picture of a vehicle with a trailer. We've got some numbers there, so it's now detected a trailer is connected. If we hit our manual slide, our tester here, we should get some amperage being drawn here. And there it is. Our brake controller's activating, and this is simulating trailer brakes. So we know it's sending an output, and we can see that the lights are also turning on, the left and right turn lights. So our brake lights would also come on in our trailer when we use our manual slide. Should still function when you hit the brake. Now, it's not gonna be as much intensity, because this is an inertia based system which means it's gonna be a proportional brake controller. Proportional brake controllers, they supply their output based on that brake input, that you're pressing the brake, and also with the movement of the vehicle and the settings that you currently have applied. You got your sensitivity and things like that. And that completes our installation of Tekonsha's P3 trailer brake controller on our 2022 Chevrolet Colorado..
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