Curt TriFlex NEXT Trailer Brake Controller w/ Custom Harness - 1 to 4 Axles - Proportional
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2016 Ram 1500
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2016 Ram 1500
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This compact brake controller fits nicely in your cab. It's designed to mount flush to the dash and is only 1" thick. The controls are simple, the LED display is large and bright, and the manual override is easy to reach in a pinch.
Features:
Specs:
Gain 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 gray rocker switch to adjust the gain on a scale of 0.5 to 9.9 in increments of 0.5.
Once you have the gain set, you can fine-tune your braking by adjusting the load control on a scale of 1 to 9 using the black rocker switch. This 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.
The LED display on the TriFlex is large and easy to read at a glance. You can adjust the brightness or trigger night mode so it won't glare obnoxiously on your dash. It also will give you error messages you can use to troubleshoot.
The TriFlex offers key safety features to prevent damage to various components of your towing setup. This starts with built-in protection against shorts and positive and negative power reversal, as well as continous diagnostic checks to alert you to any potential problems as they come up. To minimize the drain on your vehicle's battery, the TriFlex will automatically go into sleep mode after 5 minutes of inactivity. Sleep mode will turn off again the moment you press the brake pedal.
Automatic leveling means your mounting options are limitless, so long as you can still easily access the controller and the manual override. The included bracket is designed to mount the brake controller flush to the dash so it takes up almost no space at all.
The included custom-fit adapter plugs into the port on your vehicle's built-in brake control wiring harness, which you'll find underneath the dash, to the left of the steering column, taped to another harness near the emergency brake pedal. Once you're plugged into the factory port, just plug the other end of the adapter into the TriFlex. No hardwiring needed!
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 control installation kit (ETBC7 - sold separately).
Proportional braking means that your trailer brakes mimic your tow vehicle's brakes. If you slam on the brakes in your vehicle, 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's braking. This saves wear and tear on the tires and the brakes on both your vehicle and trailer.
The TriFlex uses an internal 3-axis accelerometer to sense 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.
Hey there neighbors, Kevin here with etrailer and today we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Curt TriFlex Next trailer brake controller here on our 2025 Ram 1500. If you plan on towing a trailer or maybe your camper and that trailer or camper has trailer brakes on it, you're gonna need a way to actually actuate those brakes. And most of the time, especially with a half ton truck, you're not gonna have a factory trailer brake controller. So adding one in aftermarket is going to be a must so that way you can go out on those trips or do your job as you're hauling stuff around on that trailer. Now our trailer brake controller that we install today is the Curt TriFlex and it's going to be able to actuate trailer brakes up to four axles. Now that's a quite a bit of overkill for a half ton truck.
Typically you're gonna be in that tandem axle range, but if you do have a much larger truck or maybe you upgrade from that 1500 up to a one ton truck later on and you can actually haul all that weight, then you can easily just unplug your Curt TriFlex and pop that into your new vehicle. Now here's our Curt TriFlex actually mounted up and all ready to go. And you can see it is a knee knocker style brake controller. So this does live on the outside of your dash. It's not gonna be just a simple button like a Redarc brake controller would offer you, but it is pretty slim compared to a lot of the other knee knocker style brake controllers that are out there on the market.
And the bracket that it's using to mount up doesn't add a bunch of space. A lot of the other ones will have more of a longer mounting tabs so that way you can angle the brake controller so that way you can see it better, but that also adds more room that you're losing because the brake controller's gonna now sit out further. Like I was saying earlier, it is a plug and play connection. So we have our wiring harness ran up behind our dash here and then we have our factory wire harness connector down inside of our kick panel here and we used a custom fit harness for our specific vehicle. There are a bunch of the other options out there depending on your vehicle and you can get that custom fit harness or figure out a universal fit, which we would also be able to help you with if you are having any issues.
So this brake controller is going to be proportional. Back in the day it used to just be time delayed where you could kind of set that timing and then after however many seconds that you had set it would then activate the brakes based on what your gain was on your brake controller. Proportional is going to be slightly different. It's going to give you that same intensity. So if I barely pressed on my brakes, it should barely press on the brakes on the trailer.
If I slam on the brakes, maybe I'm about to hit the car in front of me, they just stopped at the yellow light and I don't wanna ram into the back of 'em. I can slam on the brakes on my truck and that's gonna do the same exact amount of force on the trailer brakes itself. Now there is a load setting that's also on this as well, so you can kind of fine tune that a little bit more. Maybe that proportional isn't exactly what you're wanting, you're wanting a little bit more oomph with that breaking power. You could raise up that gain and you can also raise up that load so that way it's gonna bite those brakes a little bit harder and make sure that you're coming to a nice safe stop. Now in terms of installation, I didn't really have to use any specialty tools or anything. The only thing you honestly need is just a screw gun with a Phillips head bit so that way you can screw in the two screws for our mounting bracket. Getting to our wire harness with this being a 25, they hid the plug down in the kick panel. So I just popped this out by hand. I didn't need any other panels popped off of my dash. I kind of just laid down here, stuck my hand up in there and there was plenty of room for me to fish the wire harness through and then zip tied it in a couple of different locations just to prevent it from draping down at all. And that's honestly it. So this is something you could definitely do at home in just a matter of minutes, but if you are the person where you maybe don't have that factory plug or it's hidden inside of the dash up behind the stereo and you just don't feel comfortable tearing the whole dash apart to get to that, then please feel free to use our dealer locator and you can enter in your zip code to find a shop near you and get it professionally installed. If you are wanting to do this yourself, then stick around and I'll walk you through the process. Starting off our install, we're gonna be looking for our factory wire harness and that's gonna match up. It'll have the female version of this connector right here and that's gonna allow us to easily just plug in our brake controller and cut out the vast majority of our install time here. So to find that we're gonna start by digging out our area over here and to get into that where we will want to pry up on our little trim panel here. And for this side we'll wanna pull straight back 'cause it's usually just push pins going straight into it. Get my fingers back there. There we go. And there is our plug right there. So the next step is figuring out exactly where you wanna mount up your brake controller. With ours today it's gonna have this mounting bracket. So I've marked onto pieces of painter's tape where I wanted to have it and then I checked up behind the dash here, make sure there's nothing back behind there. Marked out some different lines on there 'cause I've got some support brackets coming up so I wanted to make sure I wasn't gonna drill until like the edge of that. I wanna have it on a nice flat surface so I know it's nice and secure, but I've got that marked and you can see I've got two little dots, that's where my mounting holes are. So I held that up, I had a level on it and made sure that it was gonna sit nice and level once it actually is installed and I got it at the height that I want it to be at so that way it's not in a way to where it would be hanging down too low and you might kick it but also you don't want it all the way over on the other side where you're gonna be hitting your knee on it every time you get in and out of your truck. So now that we're at that point, I am going to mark out those holes. I'll pull back that tape because we have self-tappers. So realistically all I need to do is make a little notch in there so that way I can see exactly where I wanna put that mounting bracket. The mounting bracket's gonna have a double-sided tape that we're gonna stick on there too. And then we'll run our self-tapping screws through into our dash and then we can mount up our brake controller and hook into our wiring. Just enough to mark our spots. I'm gonna pull back the tape. So for our double-sided tape I wanna flip that over, so we'll pull off the red side first, I'll get that lined up on there properly and then we can peel off my backing here. Now for our mounting bracket, I did stick on a double-sided tape and I cut out little spots so that way it doesn't wrap itself around our screws. And we're gonna put that in. I'm gonna get the first one started here, get my other one in, make sure I have this exactly how I want. There we go. Now we can press on that, get that to stick and we can come back with our Phillips head bit here and screw these in. Now we can double check. Make sure it is still good there. Yep, we are. So we'll pop that back off. Now we're gonna route our wiring and hook up here. Now this is pretty short, they don't really give you a lot of extra length here. So what I'm gonna try to do is the supports that sit behind our dash here, I'm gonna run my wiring through it so I can have it held up out of the way so that way we're not catching that with our foot anytime we're hitting the brake or the gas pedal. And then I'll probably zip tie in a couple spots but it's gonna be a little bit too hard to have both me and the camera down there at the same time. So I'm gonna get that done and then we'll show you how we did it. So like I said, I ran it up over those two supports that we have here. There is some wiring up in there as well, so I zip tied it in a couple of different spots just to make sure that cable can't ever hang down. Once we got it over to the kick panel here, I ran it behind this harness up top here and I left it a little loose just so that I can plug it in. And then once we have it plugged in, I'll probably zip tie it as well. Probably just right about here, just wanted to kind of see how it was gonna fit in. But I wanted to show you guys plugging this in. So once you're all ready, you can pop that in, you'll hear it click and like I said, I'm gonna zip tie that up, keep that nice and tight and then we can replace our kick panel. And with that back in place, now our install's complete, we just need to actually go hook up to a trailer and test that our brake controller. Alright, so we've hooked up to our trailer now. We have our seven way in, we've got our safe chains, we're all ready to go here. Now if we look down at our brake controller, we have a couple of options of what we want to do here. And first one, when we hit our mode button, it's gonna show up, it's gonna be gain and you can see it's at 5.0. So if we wanted to adjust that, there's little arrow buttons right next to the mode that are in black. So we can push that up. Now gain is going to be the amount of voltage we're sending back to our brakes. So how much force we want for that to bite down with. Now when we switch it to load, that's gonna be how sensitive this is. So essentially like a proportional braking system you would, if you slam down on the brakes, you'd want that to kind of have the same reaction back at the trailer brakes itself. So the higher we go with that load, the more aggressive it's going to bite onto those breaks. Now if we find, eh, it's maybe just a bit too aggressive for how we're wanting to do this, what we can do is just run that gain and the load back down a bit. So I'm gonna start off, we have not tested this at all yet, so I'm gonna put the gain and the load down at five because this goes up to 10. So that way we can kind of have a baseline to go off of. Once we're past that, it's going to be your brightness so you can turn that down or back up. It's gonna go one through three. Next thing's gonna be a night mode or day mode and that's just the back lighting. So you could see our numbers swapped from white to black and then our back light is white in this mode. If we wanted to switch that back, just switch back over, switch it to night and then we'll have a black back light and white numbers. The only other thing on here is going to be our manual override, which is this slide button right here. And as we press it, that's going to activate the brakes on our trailer manually without actually activating the brakes on our truck. So all that being said, why don't we get out and actually get this a little test run. I'm gonna pull out and we can go and drive around the parking lot and kind of feel what we need to do to kind of adjust this and get it to the right settings for this specific trailer. Now obviously that's gonna vary depending on what you're pulling. So yours could be a little bit different than what we set ours up to. So with this trailer, we're not going that highway speeds. I mean max I'm hitting here is like 25 since we're in a parking lot. But overall, manual override is hitting immediately and really locking those brakes up and getting us to a real controlled stop immediately. As far as using our brake pedal to stop us, I did put the load up just two more and it does feel a lot better. It's stopping me a lot quicker. So like I said, this is gonna vary depending on what you're hauling. Obviously the weights are all gonna be different so that can definitely play a big factor in it and then just the type of trailer itself too, 'cause you gotta factor in a bunch of other things as well. But overall this is a pretty easy to use system. So if you're looking for something that's gonna be really plug and play and something that's just gonna pop right in and be easy to control, very user friendly 'cause there's realistically only four buttons here that you're gonna be playing with and really clear display. So overall I do think this is gonna be a good option for our neighbor with his Ram today. Well, it's gonna do it for our look at and installation of the Curt TriFlex Next trailer brake controller here on our 2025 Ram 1500. My name's Kevin and if you still have some questions about what's going to be the right trailer brake controller for your Ram 1500 or you have questions about the install, please feel free to reach out to us via our ask the experts link, a comment on this video or a phone call to our customer service department and we'd be happy to help you out on your journey.
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