Video Transcript for Install: Roadmaster Direct-Connect Base Plate Kit on a 2016 Volkswagen Jetta

Hi, John with etrailer. If you're ready to flat tow your Volkswagen, well, then take a look at this. This is Roadmaster's Direct-Connect baseplate kit, and we've installed it on a 2016 Volkswagen Jetta. Now real quick, if you are interested in flat towing your Jetta and you haven't done it before, there are five major components that you need. One being the base plate, and that's what we're gonna be talking about in this video here. You also are gonna need safety cables, a tow bar.

Depending on what state you live in or travel through, you may need a supplemental braking system. And then you're also gonna need some diode wiring. That's just gonna be some of the essentials that you would need to flat tow your Volkswagen Jetta. Now, about the Roadmaster baseplate here, this is a great base plate. This kit doesn't require any welding.

The arms are removable here. This is all powder coated, a black finish on here. And these arms are removable. We'll take the safety cables off here off the tabs. These tabs are a part of the base plate that runs behind the bumper here.

So what we're looking at, you just pull a pin, rotate it, and these arms will come right out. So your Jetta will retain a near factory look with the base plate installed. You don't have one of those big crossmember style type that fit across the front and fold up. This is a really super clean base plate that you can install in just a few hours. The Roadmaster baseplate is made in the USA, and it accepts Roadmaster style links on your tow bar.

So that is something else you need to consider. If you have Blue Ox ends or a Blue Ox tow bar, it's not the end of the world. You can get the Roadmaster style ends to fit up with the Jetta and the Roadmaster baseplate. Now something else to keep in mind when you're flat towing a Jetta is how low it sits versus if you've got a motorhome or whatever you're towing it with. So something to consider also, it's gonna be an adjustable style hitch such as this Gen-Y here. That's gonna bring the tow bar in line with the Jetta. When you're flat towing, you want this plane right here between the RV and the car as level as possible. You never wanna see any more than 3 inches in either direction. As far as installation of the base plate on the Jetta, it gets pretty involved, mostly due to Volkswagen. There's a lot of things when you have to take the fascia, the front fascia off of this car, that even the directions are, they're good, but sometimes a car doesn't want to cooperate. And then in this instance, it was the same thing with some problems that we had with trying to remove the grill. So we we're able to work around that. Other than that, the base plate, it fits the Jetta great. There is some drilling that you have to do, but I like the way that it mounts up. I like the quality of Roadmaster. And this is just something that if you're interested in flat towing, I just consider it an investment because this is something that's gonna last for you. If you wanna see what it takes to install this base plate on the Jetta, or if you wanna see what a shop has to go through to install it, stick around and we'll show you. Now to begin our installation, you're gonna wanna pop the hood and there's four T25 screws that are holding our front grill on. Now hang onto your T25. We can come over to the wheel wells. I'm gonna remove the T25 screws that are holding our inner liner. If you're having trouble getting your tool in here, you can turn the wheel and that'll make it a little bit easier. Now if you pull back the inner liner, you're gonna have another T25 screw right here, and it's facing up in this direction. It's gonna be a little bit tough to get to, so I've got an extension and a wobble. Now keep your same T25 Torx bit and work your way around the front. There's gonna be a number of fasteners that are gonna be holding the front fascia to the car. Ours is missing a few fasteners and yours might be as well. That's so I don't really have a count for you here. Just kind of pull at the fascia here and work your way around. Now if you have fog lights, there's gonna be a panel on the inside of the wheel well here you can remove to disconnect the fog lights. The cover, you can just pop 'em off from the bottom and then reach your hand in to disconnect the fog light. Now at this point, your fascia is almost ready to come off. The only thing that's holding it on right now is gonna be three T30 Torx screws: one, two, and three. Now they're behind the grill here. In the direction, they'd say that in order to remove the grill, once you've got the top loose, it tell you to grab it and pull straight back. And I'm just not comfortable doing that on this car. So as an alternative method, if you're having the same problems at home, I'm gonna use a low profile ratchet and a T30 Torx, and I'm just gonna work my way back behind here and remove these fasteners without removing the grill. I was able to reach the outer two with the low profile wrench. As far as the middle one, you can take a pick and you could pop out the Volkswagen symbol and that's going to just give you free access for this center T30 screw that needs to come out. Now we should have all of the bolts removed that's holding the fascia on. So we can come over to the wheel wells on both sides and you're gonna pull out on this outer fascia and it's gonna pop out. These came out pretty easy, but yours might come out a little bit harder than that. So this is loose. I'll come around to the other side and do the same thing. And just gently pull back on the fascia. And since we already disconnected our fog lights, there's nothing else holding this on, so we can just set this off to the side. Now if we come over to the driver's side, we're gonna have two connectors that we need to disconnect here. One is gonna be the power for the louvers, and I'm just pinching this tab right here, and then we can separate. The other one is gonna be the ambient air temperature sensor. Now to remove the connectors from their little clips here, there's gonna be a tab on the backside. Just push that down like this, bend, and then push up on it. So that's the tab I was pushing down on, and then slide these up. They need to be disconnected from the car because now we're gonna remove the louvers with a T30 Torx bit. We have one on each side. (Torx bit whirring) It may want to come down on you. Ours had some damage to 'em. (Torx bit whirring) We can remove these. Yeah, so they normally just slide straight down and we'll set these off on the workbench. On both sides of your louver, this is the backside of the louver, you're gonna see a mounting tab out here and then a shelf. And then in your directions, you're gonna have a little diagram that shows you what you need to cut. Basically what you're doing is you're gonna trim this flush and then cut this off as well. So we're just gonna have this height all the way across. You wanna do that on both sides. This plastic will cut pretty easy, but today I'm gonna be using a cordless oscillating tool to trim this. (oscillating tool whirring) And you're gonna have a diagram in your directions outlining how you need to mark off the inside of your louvers We're gonna trim these on both sides, again, using the oscillating tool. (oscillating tool whirring) We need to come to the center of the linkage on the louvers. We're gonna pull up on this and disconnect this. Just kind of. Now we need to take the top set of louvers out on each side. You can take a flathead screwdriver and pry right on the middle here and it'll slide the latch over. I can slide it out. And once again, your directions are gonna have a diagram to let you know how you need to trim each side. Just to let you know, I did flip these louvers over, and your sizes are gonna be different on the driver's side and passenger side. (oscillating tool whirring) Okay, stand our louvers up on the top, we're gonna have our air temperature sensor up here. We can just pry up on that and we're gonna relocate it. We need to drill a new half-inch hole. And again, in your directions, they're gonna tell you how to find this spot right here. (drill bit whirring) And then remount the air temperature sensor. Now we need to come back to the front of the Jetta here. And if you look for your air conditioning lines right here, you're gonna see this rubber air dam. And I've already marked off where we need to cut. We'll have to trim this air dam on both sides of the car, and again, your instructions will have a diagram showing you how you need to mark it off. (oscillating tool whirring) Now on both sides of the car, we're gonna have two bolts on the bottom of the bumper that we need to remove. Now the directions called for 15 millimeter. On our car today, they're 16 millimeter just so you know. Now, before we bolt our base plate up, we're gonna take the styrofoam cover off of the bumper beam. You're gonna have two little clips right here, and more than likely it's gonna have some sort of adhesive on the sides holding that on. Now this is gonna get replaced back up here, so just set it off to the side for now. Now in your kit you're gonna get some bolts and we need four of these. You're gonna have a lock washer and a flat washer as well. Just a side note, all of these bolts that we're gonna be using are gonna need red Loctite. This does not come in your kit, and they require this. So we can pick some up either here at etrailer, we have this for sale or any auto parts store or home store is gonna sell this stuff as well. Now, I'm not gonna put the red Loctite on the bolts just yet because we wanna make sure everything's gonna fit. So we can take our base plate and the tabs for your safety chains are gonna be up on top. So this is the top side, and we need to roll this into position. So this is the mounting tabs here and here for the louvers. The base plate's gonna go behind that, and it's gonna bolt up where we took those bumper bolts off. So you may have to bend the horn out of the way just a little bit for now. We will get this up here. So I have the base plate temporarily supported now with just one of our bolts on each side, and I didn't use red Loctite yet. We want to just keep everything until the very end, then we'll torque everything up, but it's on here tight enough now. We have to drill some holes. Up here on the front brackets here, we're gonna be drilling up into the bumper with a half-inch drill bit. So we're gonna drill two holes per side. And then we're also gonna have to drill an access hole on the passenger side to be able to get our handle nuts in through the frame of the bumper here. So we're gonna begin by drilling our holes in the bottom here. (drill bit whirring) I am just using a half-inch bit right now. Kind of mark our center point, and I'm gonna start these holes with a smaller drill bit size. (drill bit whirring) Now with all of our holes drilled in the bumper on both sides and making sure everything fits right, we can begin applying the red Loctite to the bolts and getting all these bolts finger tight. And we can come back, you'll have torque specs in your installation manual. And you may have to bend these to make it a little bit easier for you. But I'd like to start with the one furthest away. And once we have all of the bolts finger tight, now we can torque into the specs in our installation manual. Now once you have everything torqued, you can just cut or break this wire off of these handle nuts. Now bend the horn back into position if you had bent it down like I did, and then we can reinstall the styrofoam cover on our bumper. Now from here, the base plate is essentially installed. The only remaining steps would be to trim the fascia and reinstall the fascia. But if you are doing diode wiring or a braking system like we are, it's best to get that stuff on there right now. We have lots of room to work on the front. We don't have to worry about trying to work our way around the fascia. So what we're gonna do right now is install our diode wiring and we'll come back, and we'll trim the fascia and reinstall it. Now we can reassemble our louvers by snapping the piece back on here. You'll see those little grooves right here and they're gonna fit over the louver controls here. Okay, make sure they're locked. Now we can replace the louvers here. The reason we we're cutting the louvers out is to fit over the base plate. Now our louvers we're previously broken on this side, so you just need a nice fit right here. Make sure your bolt holes line up. And the other thing you need to make sure is that you have them trimmed enough that they're gonna move freely, and they'll open and close as they should. So if everything looks okay, then you can just bolt 'em up. Then we can hook up the two connectors on the side and get them reattached. Now we need to trim the fascia to allow the base plate to come through. Now in order to do that, we're gonna rehang it on the car. There's diagrams in the instructions that'll help you, but I highly recommend placing it on the car. So with it centered on the car, you can kind of see we're gonna end up having to just cut this block out right here. This plastic is gonna cut best with an oscillating tool like this. You can also use a razor knife or snips. (oscillating tool whirring) Now once you have your fascia trimmed, you wanna make sure that you have enough room for your safety cables and for the removable arms to come in and out. But on the Volkswagen here, it's pretty easy. We just made a rectangle, so there's gonna be plenty of room also for the diode wiring and if you're doing a charge line or anything else. So once that's done, just reinstall your fascia in the reverse order that you took it off. Make sure you get all the fasteners, get fog lights hooked up, and that'll complete your installation of Roadmaster's Direct-Connect baseplate on the 2016 Volkswagen Jetta.