Video Transcript for Hands-On with the Westin Power Retractable Hard Tonneau Cover

Hi, I'm Matt with etrailer. Today we are going to be talking about the Westin electric tonneau cover. So let's take a closer look at it. So of course, with most electric tonneau covers, they're going to give you two things. They're going to give you that extra security and they're going to help protect things from the elements. Now, what this one does to really stand out amongst the competition is it's going to give you, one, these T-tracks right here.

And what these T-tracks allow you to do is put a ladder rack back here. So let's say you're a contractor, you want to keep your stuff nice and secured in the back of your bed. So that's going to be anything like your tools that are going to be a little more pricey. You want to make sure no one grabs them. You want to keep them protected from the elements.

Perfect spot for them. And when you put that ladder rack on here, you can put anything like your ladders, lumber, some piping, anything that is going to be extra long, good for that. Or if you're someone who does a lot of recreational stuff. So maybe you want to do a lot of camping, you can put your tent gear back here and have that ladder rack hold your rooftop tent or some kayaks. Or if you're someone who just does a lot of hauling and you want to put a fifth wheel back here, this sits high enough from our bed rails where most times that is going to be compatible since we can even move this some and stop it to really fine-tune where that sits at.

Now before I go over what it's going to be like to actually use, make sure you're using our Fit Guide to make sure you're getting the right one for your truck since we are going to have a lot of different fits for this. You just need to put in your year, make, model, and your bed length to know if it's going to be compatible or not. Now, when it comes to living with it, you're going to have this little key fob. You'll get two of them with your kit. One of them you can just keep in your truck, just have handy.

The other one, I'd recommend having it with your other key for your truck. And with this, there's going to be four buttons. Now before we can even get it moving, first, you need to start with hitting this button on the very bottom. That's going to be an unlock button. You hit that, a little light pops on, and then you hit the extend or retract. In my case, I'm going to hit the extend button to get this to close and cover our bed. Naturally moves at a relatively quick rate compared to some other electric ones I've seen out there. Then when it's closed, then hit the retract. Now sometimes when you hit this and you wait a few seconds, it's not going to do anything because it's already locking in place. So what you'll have to do is hit that lock button once more and then you'll be able to retract it. And if you don't want to close it all the way, you can stop it right there just by hitting that button once more. And then we can talk about the light. The light you can just turn on and off just by hitting that third button from the top. And it does give us a good visuals of what's happening inside of here. But let's say something happens to your battery, your car is dead, or your truck's dead, and you need access to some stuff that's further back here. Now what you can do is still use it in the manual mode. It's going to be a little bit trickier if your tonneau car is all the way extended out. I'm going to have mine retracted at the moment just to show you what's happening here though. So what you'd do is just come right over here. You're going to have a plate here in the side. It's going to be right next to this anchor point I have, and it's going to be a hand knob, right here. I'm just going to undo that hand knob. Once that's undone, I can remove that plate by pushing up on it. And if you do have these anchor points installed still, it's going to be a little bit tricky to get around. Of course, this is going to be vehicle-specific sometimes. You can just move it enough to get your hand inside of here. That's what I would typically do. And there's going to be a little clutch. There's going to be a bar that goes straight down. You'll pull it towards you. Now this is putting it into manual mode. And now that I've moved that clutch, we can move this. But what I found, just trying to work with it right now, sometimes it wants to move like this. What I'd recommend doing is sticking your hand underneath here, applying pressure to that bar towards you, and then it's going to move a lot easier. There it is, just like that. Now, if this is all the way extended out, you might be the one in here pulling on that lever and you might need something to push out from the outside, but this is going to be a pretty rare thing that's going to happen with your setup. Now the last thing I did want to talk about with the cover itself is they're going to have a stop point built into it. So if there is a lot of tension on this cover, it is built to stop. So I'm going to put my arm in here and we're going to see it's going to stop against my arm. And I will say there still is a decent amount of tension built into this. You can see it senses my arm and it slows down. So that gives you time to take it out. You can tell there's a decent amount of pressure on here. I wouldn't feel comfortable having my fingers in here, so definitely keep that in mind. But what I think that caters itself a lot more to is if you have, let's say, a fridge back here. You have that fridge back here and you wanted to get it as close to that fridge as possible, maybe even touching it, it can do that and it's not going to burn out the motor on the tonneau cover itself. And now I want to move over to the actual rails because what stands out about them is going to be these T-tracks, which is very unique. So I've talked a little bit about that you can put a ladder rack on here, but how do you do that So the way it works is you'll just take a T-bolt. That'll go right through this channel right here and you'll connect that to the ladder rack itself. And there's a lot of ladder racks that actually have that ability. And if they don't have that ability right out of the box, you can get an adapter kit for them. A perfect example of that would be the Yakima Overhaul ladder rack. That's a very popular one, very adaptable. But you just get that kit to go with it. We actually had that full kit here at etrailer, and that would just slide into place, and now you can carry those extra long things on the back of your truck. But now I want to go over is how this tonneau cover is actually sitting on our bed now. So with the setup, the rails and the tonneau cover itself actually sits on top of our bed rails. And that makes it sit a little bit more, but we get a lot of benefits from that being which we can fit more inside of our bed. So we got a lot of camping stuff back here. We got a five-gallon bucket too, still plenty of space in between the actual tonneau cover and the bottom of the bed. But if I come over here and get that distance from the cover itself, that's going to be a little bit over 21 inches. So what you could do is if you have a fifth wheel, make sure that you get that measurement and compare it to how a tonneau cover would sit back here. In most cases, this is going to be compatible. And the next thing with how it sits on here is how it's installed. It's going to be a little bit different between vehicles out there, but Westin really takes advantage if they can to a stronger point to install it to. And what I mean by that is you notice right over here, we have this pretty large bracket. This point was already here to begin with, so we didn't have to make any modifications. We just took off the utility bracket off here, put a bracket on, and then we we inchesre still able to use that utility bracket so you won't lose out on that. And this gives us an extra point to hold this down. It makes it extra secure. Now, something else with this, we're going to have tubing on all four corners, because since this does have this track that goes through there, we want to make sure we can get water out of it. So having it on all four points does go a long way to keep water out from our bed. It does a really good job at that. We actually had a really strong rain that came through here. I didn't really have any water in here, so I was very impressed by that. Now the other side of this installation, since it is going to be electric, is the wiring, and that is actually pretty easy. All we had to do was route the wire underneath the truck to our battery, so you don't have to splice into anything. It just connects to the battery, just like that. Something I want to take a closer look at too is going to be the light we get with this. So I turned off the lights in the shop. This does give us quite a bit. In some instances, if you got something kind of in a crevice or so, that might be kind of hard to see still, but this is still going to go a long way compared to a lot of other ones where you have to bring in an external light to find what you need. That being said, if you're someone who's pretty handy around the house or you're very much a DIY-type of person, you can definitely do this yourself. But you might not have the time or maybe you got a lot of other projects around the house, and adding to that just isn't in your time right now. So you can actually use our Install Locator to find someone who can install it for you. But if you want to see that process for installing it, you can actually check out one of our other videos. I go through that process there. But other than that, that's pretty much it. Again, I think this is going to be a very sturdy tonneau cover that's going to give you a lot of convenience. And you're going to get that adaptable nature from it since we do have these T-tracks, so you can add to it later on down the road. Now there's going to be another tonneau cover that has a lot of those features, and the other one is going to be the Pace Edwards one. It's also going to be electric, it uses a key fob, and it's going to have some T-channels on the side of it as well. But this one does offer you a couple different things. So one of those is going to be that it has that light inside of there, so you can see what you're doing a little bit more at night, or if it's just kind of dark in the back of that truck. And the other thing it's going to offer you is a little bit of a different installation process. A lot of times, the Pace Edwards are going to use clamps that grab onto your bed rails. This one in our case today is using some brackets to mount here. So that just makes it a little bit more sturdy. But really at the end of the day, it's going to come down to which one you have more experience with. If you've had Pace Edwards for years, it's not a bad one to go with. But if you want something a little bit more new, I'd check this one out right here. Now, if you guys had any other questions, you can let us know here at etrailer. And again, I'm Matt, and thanks for watching.