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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.
Alternate Instructions
California residents: click here
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Speaker 1: Today in our 2016 Hyundai Santa Fe, we'll be having a look at and showing you how to install the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller, part number 90195, in conjunction with the eTrailer 7-Way Trailer Brake Controller Kit, part number ETBC7. Here's what our brake controller looks like installed. Now, the reason you're going to want a brake controller such as this one is because if you're towing a trailer that has electric brakes, you need to have a way for them to operate. This will allow them to function properly.Now, being a proportional brake controller, this is going to give us the smooth and reliable stops that we're looking for. It's going to apply the brakes on the trailer in a similar manner to how the brakes are being applied in our vehicle. Compared to a time delay brake controller where there is a delay with the brakes being applied with the brakes being applied in the vehicle.
Once they start being applied, it'll apply full power. So, it actually gives you a jerky stop compared to proportional, which is nice and smooth.Many of our customers like the fact that this is a proportional brake controller and the display is customizable so they can change the color of it to match the interior colors of the dash of their vehicle. You can have green, you can have blue, you could have white, you could have red. Doesn't matter. You can match whatever color you have in your vehicle.
Other customers also like the fact that this brake controller can do electric over hydraulic brakes, which you'll see in a lot of larger trailers.This is unique because not a lot of brake controllers out there can do electric over hydraulic and standard electric brakes at the same time. This brake controller will allow you to control up to four axles of trailer brakes. Now, operating this brake controller is very simple. On the bottom, we have our manual override and this will control the brakes on the trailer so they can be applied without you applying your vehicle brakes. The further over you slide the knob, the more power that's being applied, up to the maximum of where you have it set currently.These two buttons here control how much power is going to your trailer brakes.
Up, you can go all the way up to 14, and down, you can go all the way down to zero. It's a good idea to start out somewhere in the middle, so around seven. That way, you can adjust up or down, depending upon your needs. This button over here to the top right, this is our boost button. We have three different levels of boost.
Right now, we don't have boost enabled. You press it once, we'll get boost level one, press it again, boost level two, and then boost level three.What boost does is the higher boost level setting you have, the fast the brakes will be applied and with more tensity. So, it starts to ramp up how much power goes down vs. gradually applying the power. This is great if you encounter going down steep terrain that you didn't think was that steep. You can just press the button once and get more power going to your brakes so you can stop faster as opposed to having to adjust it over here. With one press, you can make it a lot easier for you.This button here, this is for your settings. You can change your display settings here by brightness, your color, the contrast. The color, you can go from all sorts of colors of the spectrum, all depends what you want. I'm going to leave ours on blue because that is the color of the dash in this vehicle. Now, even though this brake controller is more complicated than most, many of our customers like the fact that they actually have so much customization with it. Once you get used to how the menus operate, it is fairly easy to use.Just changing your brake type, you can easily go from electric to electric over hydraulic. You even have a help screen, which gives you contact information, troubleshooting guide, you can change the language on it. So, as you can see, it'll only take you a few button presses to get your brake controller set up to exactly where you need it. Now that we've gone over some features of our brake controller, we'll show you how to get it installed. To begin our install, we first need to verify that our vehicle has a functional 4-pole wiring already installed, which we do, in our case. So, we're good to go.Now, we need to find a way to attach our 7-way to our vehicle. We have one of these short brackets on our website as part number 18140. This doesn't require any drilling. We can simply clamp this to our hitch. So, we'll just go off to the left side here next to where our door is, which covers our hitch. This way, we can still use the door when we're not towing. So, we'll wrap the clamp around the hitch and the bracket and get it started. Make sure we have the position where we need it before we tighten the clamp.Okay. This will give us a nice, solid mount for our 7-way. We'll cut off the excess of our clamp using a pair of tin snips just to give us a clean look. Now, we can attach our 7-way mounting bracket to our bracket that we clamped to the hitch using the hardware that comes with our kit. Now, we'll take our 7-way past the wires to the slot and insert it onto the bracket and we'll secure it with the provided hardware. Now, we can start making our electrical connections.Our 4-pole flat connector on the 7-way can plug into the vehicle's existing wiring if we want it to. However, for a more permanent connection, I'm going to use heat-shrink butt connectors to combine the wires together. That will also eliminate the excess slack that we have. So, it'll be easier for us to tidy up all of our wiring. They also are much more weather resistant and will provide a superior electrical connection. So, I'll take our 4-pole connector that's already on the vehicle and I'll cut off the excess. Then I'll cut off the 4-pole end from the 7-way.Our white wire here, this is our ground. We can attach this to the vehicle's sheet metal with a ring terminal or combine it with our existing ground off our 4-way, which is what we're going to do because this goes to a factory ground point on the factory tow package, which is a very sufficient ground. We'll measure off our white wire, the ground wire, to the same length as the 4-pole wire that we cut off earlier. Now, this purple wire here, this is for reverse signal input. We're not going to be using this in this application, so we'll cut this wire off, making sure we have a little bit left in case we ever decide to use it in the future.We'll separate our 4-pole flat wires that we're on the vehicle already so we have some wire to work with. Now, we can strip off the insulation from these four wires and the four wires that are off the 7-way. Place our heat-shrink butt connectors over our wire and we'll crimp it into place. We do have these butt connectors available on our website. They're for 14 to 16 gauge wire. We'll just match up our wires color for color. Now, one on blue wire, which is our electric trailer brake output wire and our black wire, which are our constant 12 volt power, these already have butt connectors that are crimped onto them. But I'm going to replace these with some 10 to 12 gauge heat-shrink butt connectors as well.So, I'm going to cut these wires off and I'll strip back the insulation. I'll just crimp the new connectors on. Now, we'll take one end of our gray duplex wire, which has two wires inside of it, and we'll separate the outer sleeve, which protects the two wires. We peel it back, we'll find a black wire and a white wire. Now, we'll strip back insulation from the white wire and the black wire. The black wire will go to the black wire on the 7-way and the white wire will go to the blue wire.This is what it looks like with all of our connections made. Now, we can use a heat gun to shrink down our butt connectors. If you don't have a heat gun, you can pick one up on our website. A heat gun is the ideal way and proper way to heat-shrink butt connectors. You don't want to use an open flame, like from a lighter, because that can actually damage the connector. Now, I'm going to tape up all of our wires. I'm going to tape the purple one by itself first just to protect the end of it in case we ever decide to make a connection to it in the future.I will now tape all of them together so we don't have any color wires hanging below our vehicle. Here, we zip tied up our wiring binder hitch here to keep it away from underneath the vehicle so you don't see it and away from our spare tire. We routed our duplex wire to the front of the vehicle, making sure we avoided any sources of heat, such as the exhaust. We used a loom clamp in a couple of spots to help hold it up above the exhaust since we didn't have anything to zip tie it to.Went above our rear subframe, have it zip tied to the fuel tank strap bracket, goes to the side of our fuel tank, comes over our fuel tank in the front, zip tied to this bracket for our parking brake cable, inaudible 00:09:50 following that forward, and we have it zip tied to this bracket for this protective shield for our brake lines, again, right here. Then at very end of the shield, at the end of our front subframe, we went ahead and dropped down a pull wire from the engine compartment and now we can pull this into the engine compartment with this pull wire.We zip tied our duplex wiring behind our air box to this wiring harness here. This'll keep it secure inside the engine compartment so it won't fall down. Now, we'll take our utility knife and we will remove the cover that covers the two wires up to that point on the zip tie, all the way down to the end. As you can see, this will expose our two wires. So, we'll just continue this until we're done. Now, we can mount our circuit breakers. We have two circuit breakers. One's 40 amp, one's a 30 amp. The 40 amp will power the constant 12 volt power on the back of the 7-way and the 30 amp will power the brake controller inside the vehicle.We'll mount these with provided self tapping screws. We'll overlap them together so we can have one screw in the middle to secure both of them. Where we have them located right here will be perfect for us because it's right next to our battery and next to where the wires come up on the firewall and also near where they need to go inside the vehicle. Now, I'll measure off how much of our black wire that we routed from the back to the front to connect to the silver auxiliary terminal on our 40 amp breaker. Okay, with it cut off for the amount that we need, then I'll strip back some insulation, place on a small yellow ring terminal, and we'll crimp that into place.Place it over the stud and put on one of our nuts, tighten that down. We'll take our section of the black wire that we cut off, strip back some insulation, take another one of our small yellow ring terminals, crimp that in place. We'll put that to the battery terminal of the 40 amp breaker, and that's the copper colored one. Now, open our positive battery terminal cover. Okay, we fed that black wire from our 40 amp circuit breaker that's going to connect to our batter terminal through our cover here. Now, we're going to measure off how much we're going to need to connect to one of our terminals.Cut off the excess, strip out the insulation, place on one of our large diameter yellow ring terminals. We'll crimp that into place. Now, we'll take our other section of black wire that we have left. We'll feed it down the same direction that we came up and we'll route that over to our other circuit breaker. Now, we'll strip off some insulation from this end, take one of our small yellow ring terminals, stick it on, crimp it, and we'll attach this to the battery terminal on our 30 amp breaker.Now, we'll measure off how much we're going to need to make the same connection to our positive post, strip back the insulation, and we'll attach one of our large diameter ring terminals. Now, we'll strip off one end of the leftover black wire that we have and we'll attach another one of our small diameter ring terminals. This will go to the auxiliary side of our 30 amp breaker. Now, it's come time for us to pass wires through the firewall into the passenger compartment of the vehicle.So, we're on the driver's side underneath the dash right now. We have a grommet in the firewall right here. I pushed it aside and grabbed a pull wire and pushed it through and it's into our engine bay. Here's our pull wire that went to the firewall. Now, our white wire that goes back to our 7-way for the electric trailer brake output and the black wire, which goes to the auxiliary side on a 30 amp breaker, we can pull these into our firewall now. So, we'll just tape these wires to our pull wire. Now, we'll bring them inside.Now, we'll cut off our excess white and black wires, strip back some insulation, take our provided yellow butt connectors, and we'll crimp them into place. Take our brake controller harness now and we'll strip back a little bit more insulation from the white wire, the black wire, the blue wire, and the red wire. Okay. The black wire from our brake controller harness will go to the black wire we ran through the firewall. The blue wire for our brake control harness will go to the white wire.Now, this white wire off our brake control harness needs to be attached directly to our vehicle's negative terminal on the battery. So, we're going to run another section of wire through the firewall. It'll be white in color just like we did these other two. We'll strip off some insulation for our white wire now, place our large diameter ring terminal on it, crimp it down, remove this 10 millimeter nut from our negative battery terminal. We'll take our nut off, place on our ring terminal, and reinstall the nut.We tape the other end up to our pull wire. This will hold it in place so we can pull all the wire that we need inside the vehicle now. Now, we'll measure off our white ground wire to the same length as our other white and our black wire, cut off the excess, strip back some insulation, crimp on one of our butt connectors. Take our white wire from our brake controller harness, stick it into the butt connector, and we'll crimp it down. Now, underneath our dash, attached to our brake pedal, you'll find our brake light switch right here. We have several wires that come off that switch.This red wire is the cold side of our brake light switch and this is where we need to tap into. So, I'll go ahead and do that and show you what it looks like when we're done. One way you can test this is with a test light. You can probe the red wire and you'll press on your brake pedal. The test light will only illuminate when the brake pedal is depressed. Okay, we used about a foot long section of 16 gauge wire and our quick splice connector to tap into the red wire on our brake light switch. You can pick up this wire as part number 16-1-1 on our website.Now, we'll take our red wire that we attached to the brake light switch, strip back some insulation, and we'll crimp on our blue butt connector. We'll attach that to the red wire from our brake controller harness. This is what it looks like with all of our connections made. Now, we need to locate a place to mount our brake controller. We have ours in our holster right now so we can mock up where we need it. I made a paint mark to show where our holster is going to mount and this will make it so our brake controller's easily accessible as we're driving, but yet is not going to interfere with anything, such as our airbag that's underneath the dash.This vehicle is equipped with a knee airbag. So, you don't want to mount anything over that. We have our bracket now, line up our paint marks, and we'll use the provided self tapping screws to secure it. I've already verified there's nothing behind the dash that we're going to damage. We use a provided wire loom and some electrical tape to cover up our wires so we'll have a nice clean look underneath the dash. We'll take our connector and we'll plug it into the brake controller. We'll now take our holster and we'll slide the brake controller into it. We'll now secure this to our bracket using the provided hardware.We went ahead and secured up any other loose wires with a couple zip ties, making sure we avoided any moving parts, such as our pedals or steering column, and we also made sure to seal up our firewall grommet where we slid it. We used some silicone sealant, which we have available on our website. Okay, with all of our connections made inside the vehicle, it's now time for us to connect our two leads, the positive terminal on a battery. To do that, we'll remove this nut. It's a 10 millimeter. Now, we'll place our two ring terminals over that stud and reinstall the nut.Okay, with all of our connections made, we can close our cover over our positive battery terminal. Next, we'll go ahead and hook up to our trailer and test out, make sure everything works by operating our manual override. We can see that our brakes are being applied on the trailer, which means the brake controller's working. When we step on our brake pedal, it comes on as well, so everything's working properly. That completes your look at and install of the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller, part number 90195, in conjunction with the eTrailer Electric Trailer Brake Controller Kit, part number ETBC7, on this 2016 Hyundai Santa Fe.
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