Video Transcript for How to Install the Curt Class I Trailer Hitch - 2025 Hyundai Elantra

Hi, this is Scott with etrailer. Today we're taking a look at installing our CURT 1 1/4 inch hitch on our 2025 Hyundai Elantra Hybrid. So our neighbor came in and wanted to get a hitch put on their Elantra, and we had the 1 1/4 inch here. They got a bike rack, and it was an inch and quarter bike rack they wanted to get installed. So they wanted a way they could haul their bikes around. So this is gonna be the perfect option for them.

The hitch is gonna have 1/2 inch pin hole opening, and that's gonna hold in any of your accessories you put in the back. Now keep in mind, this won't come with a pin and clip, so you may want to pick one up. But keep in mind, a lot of your accessories, like your bike racks and your cargo carriers, will come with a pin and clip, and some of them even come with an anti-rattle pin that will come with that. This has heavy duty, welded-on chain loops. So if you plan on pulling a small utility trailer or something like that, your S-style hooks are definitely gonna work, and also your clevis-style hook will fit that as well.

Now as far as measurements go, from the center of the pinhole out to the edge of our bumper, we're looking at right around four inches. With that measurement, you'll be able to decide on if any of your accessories, like your cargo carriers or the bike racks that fold up or stow away will make any contact with the back of your Elantra. Now from the top inside lip of our receiver down to the ground, for that measurement, we're looking at right at around 11 inches. That measurement will help you decide on if you need any rise in the shank of either your bike racks or your cargo carriers for clearance. As far as weights go for this hitch, we're looking at a tongue weight rating of 200 pounds.

That's gonna be the weight of your bike racks or your cargo carrier pushing down on the lower portion of the hitch itself. Now we're gonna have a gross trailer weight rating of 2,000 pounds. That's gonna be the weight of your trailer and everything that you have on that. Now keep in mind, it's always a good idea to take a look at your owner's manual and make sure that you're not exceeding any of your maximum towing capabilities listed in there. Now if you have any questions or comments about this hitch for your Elantra, you can always leave any questions or comments down below in the comment section, or you can get ahold of one of our experts here at etrailer.

They'd be glad to help you out. As far as installation goes, this one is very tricky and it's took a long time for us to get this one done today. So I do recommend taking a look at our Installer Locator and getting something done for you locally. If you feel like tackling it yourself, stick around, watch our video, and we'll help you get it installed. To start our installation, we have our Elantra up in the air and we're gonna have some panels underneath that we're gonna need to remove. So I'm gonna start on our passenger's side with this small panel. We're gonna have three little push pins on here we need to remove. So I'm just gonna take a flathead screwdriver, get it in the little slot, and just start popping those out. And these seem to come out pretty easy. (fastener popping) With those out, I'll remove our panel and we'll set it aside. For our center panel, right in the middle, we're gonna have a plastic 14 millimeter nut. (drill whirring) And just want to get that broke loose for now. That's gonna stay in place until we start pulling down on the panel. Those, after you have 'em broke loose, you can usually do them by hand after we get everything as far as our other fasteners out. Now on each side, we're gonna have a 10 millimeter nut. (drill whirring) And make sure you keep all your hardware in a safe location because we will be reusing those. (drill whirring) We're gonna have four plastic push pins right here on the back and then one over here right on the side. And we'll just go through and start removing all of those. Now with those all out, we want pop that down. Now we'll start on our plastic nut and just start backing that off while slightly pulling down. (panel popping) And that's gonna release that. Now we set our panel aside. For our panel on our driver's side, again, we're gonna have four plastic push pins, same procedure. Let's go ahead and get those popped out. And again, we're gonna have a plastic nut. Just pulled out on your panel. You can always just use your socket by hand, back that down. Now we would you set our panel aside. in the trunk of our Elantra, on each side, we're gonna have this little panel, and that's gonna give us access to the back of our taillight. Within here, we're gonna have our wiring, and you're not gonna be able to see it, but you're gonna have to feel around on that and you're gonna feel for a little clip on the end of it. And you'll push in on that clip and then pull out and unplug that. Now we're gonna have two 10 millimeter nuts on the back of this. We're gonna do, just take our 10 millimeter socket and remove those. (drill whirring) And once you get down to the end, be careful. You don't wanna drop that down in there. So get those set aside. (drill whirring) Now that we've done that, we'll grab onto our taillight housing and carefully just pull back on that and give it a little wiggle. And there's gonna be a little pin that it slots in right up in here in the back. And once we get that pulled out, we are gonna have a rubber grommet. You are gonna have to pull that grommet out. And once we get our grommet out, we can pull our wiring through and set that aside. Now if you're having any problems finding the little, the latch on the tab of your wiring, this is what that's gonna look, right there. You're gonna just push that down and pull out and it'll come unplugged for you. After we have our taillight out, on each side, we're gonna have a couple more fasteners. We're gonna have a little clip fastener. Lift up that with a screwdriver, pull that out. We're gonna have a 10 millimeter here on the back, 10 millimeter socket. Pull that out, set those aside. Underneath of our fascia back by our tire, we're gonna have another little push pin. Just wanna pull that down, pop that out. On our inner fender well right here, we're gonna have three Phillips head screws behind our rear tire. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (drill whirring) Now right here, we're gonna have a little access hole. And right behind that, we're gonna have an eight millimeter screw. Use an eight millimeter socket and we will get that removed. (drill whirring) underneath of our bumper cover, we're gonna have this little brackets that come down. We're gonna have two of these. We're gonna need to get the little clip out of. And again, we're just gonna get behind our little pop clip and work out that center part, and we can pull that out. Now we're gonna need to lower our exhaust. So what I did is I have a cam buckle strap up here and I just tied that off. And I brought that up snug to support our exhaust when we remove our isolators. So what I like to do is take a little bit of soapy water in a spray bottle and pretty heavy on the soap side, and I'll pull my exhaust down a little bit and I'll squirt water in both ends, and then I'll wiggle this around. And what that's gonna do is work that soapy water in and make these easier to remove. So we're gonna have three different isolators. We're gonna have this one, one on this, on the other side, and then one more towards the front that we're gonna remove. Now you can use a pry bar to back these off, but I have isolator pliers, so I'm just gonna go ahead and get on those just to save a little bit of time. And with that, those come off pretty easy. Once you get 'em to a point, usually, you can get those off of there by hand. Now we'll have one on the other side. I'll go ahead and pop off and then we'll show you the one in the front. We're just gonna use my isolated pliers. Again, you could use a pry bar if you want. Go ahead and pop that out. Sometimes it helps a push up on your exhaust a little bit. (metal clacking) (metal clacking) Now that we have that off, we'll push up on our exhaust and just let our exhaust come down nice and easy, releasing our cam buckle strap, and that's gonna give us room to work. Before we can get our fascia off, there's a couple more steps we need to do. We're gonna have our canister here. I'm gonna get this out of the way 'cause we're gonna have a couple bolts back here we're gonna need to get to. I'm just gonna take a 12 millimeter socket (drill whirring) and we'll get these back off. (drill whirring) We're gonna have one more over here on the side. (drill whirring) (metal clacking) Now we'll just start pulling down on our canister. It is gonna be held in with these little clips. We'll pull down on that with some pressure. (metal clacking) That's gonna give us a little bit more room. On each side, we're gonna have two 12 millimeter bolts that are gonna go into the back of our bumper beam. (drill whirring) Go ahead and remove those. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) (drill whirring) With that all done, now we're just gonna start in our rear well and we're gonna start pulling back on that. And with that out, we'll just come back and we're gonna have a wiring harness we're gonna need to remove. I'm gonna have a little clip on that. Push down on our clip, pull up, and we can remove that. Now we can set our fascia aside. Now in order to get our hitch put in, we're gonna need to get some trimming down on our fascia. On the bottom side of our fascia, we have it marked out, and we went by our measurements that are in our instructions. And we're also gonna have our underbody panel. That's gonna need trimmed out well. So there's a couple different ways you could do this. You can either use tin snips to get this cut out. Those seem to work pretty good. But I have my multi-tool cutter. I'm just gonna go ahead and start cutting these out. Now there is gonna be a bracket behind this. So what I'm gonna end up doing is having to remove part of that bracket behind here as well. And before you start cutting, just make sure you don't have a kick sensor or anything back there, or any kind of wires that you're gonna cut into when you start making your cut. (multi-tool whirring) (multi-tool whirring) (multi-tool whirring) Now we have our bracket back in here, which also we're gonna need to trim out. We'll just go ahead and do the same thing. We'll use our cutter and get that out of the way. (multi-tool whirring) (multi-tool whirring) For our underbody panel, we're gonna do the same thing and just get that trimmed out. Again, follow your instructions and just get that marked. Now after you're getting your hitch put in place and it doesn't quite fit, you can always come back through and trim some of these out to go ahead and make that fit. (multi-tool whirring) (multi-tool whirring) So after we made our cut, we went ahead and popped our fascia back up and just have it on there, fastened good enough up top to hold it in place, and we have it sitting there. And basically what we're gonna do is just hold our hitch up into position and get an idea and make sure our cuts are correct. So another thing I did is up underneath of here, there was a little plug here in this access hole. Went ahead and popped that out. And there was another one on the other side. I pulled that one out as well. Now it did push our canister back up and I just, it's getting held in place by the little clips. So we're just having that sit there because our hitch is gonna go around that. So we're gonna need to have that in place so that's not in our way. What we'll do now is we're just gonna roughly hold our hitch in place and see where all our mounting holes are, and we're gonna have to mark and get a hold drilled over on our driver's side. Up on our frame, we're gonna have a stud there in the way, and I need to get that out of the way so I can bring my hitch up close enough where I can mark that spot 'cause we need to drill a hole there. That's where we're gonna have a mounting point. So I'm gonna come back through with my multi-cutter and just cut off that stud. (multi-tool whirring) Another thing we're gonna have to trim out is there's some body sealer right back here, and that's kind of getting in our way. I'm gonna end up having to trim that out. But for now, I'm gonna push this back as far as I can and mark our hole. Now we had these little brackets that came up in that come down and they're gonna attach to our fascia down here. With these in the way, it's gonna interfere with where our hitch comes across. So I ended up taking a pry bar and just popping these out. Now you can get behind here with the Phillips head if you can get one back there, but I just ended up popping these out. They're just a plastic bracket. And now we're gonna have this other tab down here that is also hitting on our hitch. So I'm gonna trim this back a little bit to give us room for our hitch. That way we don't have any issues with putting any of our underbody panels back in place. Everything will line up. (drill whirring) Now right next to where we cut off that stud is where we're gonna drill our hole. And right here where I marked that, we're gonna drill a 1/2 inch hole. I'm just gonna come through with my drill and we'll get that hole drilled. (drill whirring) (drill whirring) Now for our hardware that's gonna go into this hole, we're gonna run our fish wire that comes into our kit into the hole and we're gonna run it back to the access hole. We're gonna take one of our spacer blocks, put that onto our fish wire. And we're gonna take our carriage bolt and then we're gonna run that onto our coiled wire. Just get that threaded up, almost right there to where it stops. Now we'll take our spacer block, push that up into our frame, followed by our carriage bolt. And we'll pull that down through and we'll leave our fish wire on. For our other side where we already have our access hole, we're gonna go ahead and do what we call reverse fish wiring. We're gonna put on our spacer and we're gonna go on with our carriage bolt, we'll just thread that down, push our carriage bolt up through all by our special block. We'll pull that back down through. And again, we'll leave on our fish wire. For our body sealer on both sides, I just want to cut this back a little bit and kind of get this flushed so my hitch will have a place to sit a little more flat on the back. (multi-tool whirring) Now to get our hitch in place, this is a little bit tricky. We're gonna need to get our fish wires in through our holes, get those in, and we're gonna start pushing our hitch up into position. Now at this point, we need to get our fascia lifted over our hitch. You gotta get our hitch to go back under our fascia. (metal clacking) Then we can pull down our bolt through our hitch, (metal clacking continues) we'll get our fish wire off and we'll start that nut, our flange nut. Run that up as far as you can by hand. (metal clacking) Now back here, we're gonna need to take one of our spacers, run that behind our hitch, and then we'll follow that up in with a bolt. So to give you an idea of how the hardware goes, you can see we have our spacer in there, and that is between the body and frame of our car in our hitch. Then we have our bolt that goes through and our conical tooth washer that's gonna be facing our hitch. Now what we'll do now, we have all of our hardware in place, now we'll come back through and we'll snug everything down. (drill whirring) All right, after we have all of our hardware snugged down, we'll come back through with our torque wrench and we'll torque everything down to the specifications listed in our instruction manual. Now if you don't have a torque wrench, you can pick one up here at etrailer. We do have some options available, or you can take a look at your local auto parts store. You should be able to rent one there. (torque wrench beeping) Now that we have everything torqued down, we'll come back through, get our exhaust up, and the rest of our underbody panels. Now if we run into anything that came up and would need to show you that you'll have to do on yours, we'll go ahead and jump in and show you that. Now we are gonna have to trim off this edge. Trying to get this up in there, our hitch is in the way, so we're just gonna lose this fastener. This one's just a plastic fastener anyway, so that really isn't gonna hold onto much. So we're gonna get this trimmed off so we can fit our under panel in. And then we're gonna keep on getting everything put back together. And that was a look at our CURT 1 1/4 inch hitch on our 2025 Hyundai Elantra Hybrid. I'm Scott with etrailer, and thanks for watching.