Video Transcript for Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller with Adapter Installation - 2019 Toyota Highlander

Conor: Hey everybody, Conor here today at etrailer.com. We're going to be going over and showing you how to install the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller here on our 2019 Toyota Highlander. So our universal trailer brake controller install kit is going to do just what it sounds like with the title. It's going to allow us to install a trailer brake controller and tow a trailer with brakes using our Highlander here. So it is a universal kit so we're going to be able to use it on any vehicle, but it is going to be a perfect option here for this Highlander.It does come with everything we need for this process to install a brake controller. Some of these components are going to be the circuit breakers.

We're going to have the four and 7-way trailer connector adapter, and we're also going to have our bonded wire as well as any of the other connectors we need to make this possible. So what's really nice about this kit is that we're going to have both a four and 7-way trailer connector. So we have the 4-way on the side here when we're towing our smaller trailers without brakes and we're also going to have our 7-way over here when we do need to tow that larger trailer. And it's going to have an additional circuit for both the battery charge line, as well as the electric brake output.So our key here, it does come with this bracket, which attaches both of our trailer connector to another bracket on the vehicle here. So if you have the factory hitch on your Highlander, you're going to have this little bracket welded to the trailer hitch, that'll allow you to attach the bracket for the trailer connectors.

So that can get kind of confusing, but essentially there's going to be two brackets. The main bracket here for our trailer connector and then the bracket that allows us to attach our trailer connector to the trailer hitch.If you don't have a factory hitch, you have an aftermarket hitch. We actually sell some no-drill brackets that'll pretty much duplicate or mimic the same bracket we have here. They offer a no-drill design. They simply wrap around the crosstube on the trailer hitch and provide a connection point for our bracket here.

So in regards to install, this is definitely something you guys can do at home by ourselves. We really don't need any specialized tools and you really don't need to have a lot of mechanical know-how to be able to do this on your own.So as regards to the seven and 4-way, this is actually going to plug into a 4-way. So we're actually going to need one of these already on our vehicle. If you don't already have an existing 4-way, you can pick one of these up here at etrailer. We have tons of great plug and play options.

So this is the screen we're going to get when we have our trailer connected here. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and adjust our power. We can do this with the gain settings on the left-hand and right-hand side of the controller. So this is pretty much going to be geared towards our specific trailer and how much weight we have or how much we're hauling.We're going to be able to fine tune our brakes here. So we're not locking up our wheels or driving down the highway, but we're able to come to a smooth and clean stop with both the tow vehicle and trailer. And once we find the correct gain for our trailer, we can go ahead and hit okay. So the thing I really like about the P3 is that there's actually going to be five storable settings. Meaning we can go through that gain adjustment procedure and store this for five different trailers. So if we have multiple trailers, then the P3 is going to be the perfect option for you.So the P3 is going to be an excellent option here for a Toyota Highlander. It's actually one of the top brake controllers on the market and for good reason. It's been around a long time, it's well-reviewed and it's proven that it works great day in and day out. The P3 is a proportional brake controller. And what that means is it's going to apply brakes to our trailer in an amount proportional to that and the towed vehicle. So say we're on the highway, somebody cuts in front of us, we really need to slam on her brakes and slow both us and our trailer down. The vehicle is going to send a lot of braking force to our trailer in order to help to come to that stop.However, say we're just moseying around in town, we just need to come to a slow stop at a stoplight. We're not going to get that huge in rush of braking force to our trailer. We're just going to get a slow, steady current to help us come to a stop. So something else that P3 has that I really like. So say we're at the upper end of the towing capacity on our Highlander. So we really want those brakes, we're going to set our game pretty high, but there's also another feature that we can help to really get on the brakes sooner. And that's going to be the integrated boost settings.We're going to have three different boost settings here, which are really going to help those trailer brakes grab right away. So it is a proportional brake controller so we don't have to wait for that delay, but the boost feature is going to let you get that maximum power much sooner than you would normally. So if you want to turn on the boost settings, it's super easy to do so. This button in the upper right-hand corner allows you to select the first boost setting, the second, the third or you can turn it off altogether.So for those special occasions where we really need to get on the brakes really quick, we're going to have our manual override button here. It's a nice, easy-to-use slide lever on the bottom that'll send full power to the trailer's brakes. So as the P3 is a premium brake controller, you're going to get a little bit more finer details, which is the ability to adjust the color or the backlighting of our LED display as well as the brightness, which you can do here. We can also within these displays select our brake type. So that brings me to my next point about the P3 is that it's going to be a great option if you have a boat trailer with electric over hydraulic brakes.Because keep in mind, not all brake controllers are compatible with such. So if you do have that, the P3 is going to be an excellent option because you can effectively control those trailer brakes. Here we see the option for hydraulic, which means we can use this with electric over hydraulic brakes. But most of the applications are just going to be standard electric, so we'll make sure we're on that setting.So in summary, you really can't go wrong with the P3. As we said, it's really tried and true brake controller. It's going to work well for pretty much any vehicle and any trailer. We have tons of storable settings that we can use for different trailers, all sorts of features, such as the boost settings that are really going to help us take full control of our trailer.So the first step is going to be to go ahead and mount both of our trailer connectors here. Now we touched on this earlier, but if you have a factory hitch, there's going to be a bracket that we can utilize. But if not, you're going to need to pick up an additional no-drill bracket here through etrailer. So once we get our trailer connector mounted, we can go ahead and begin making a few of our connections.The first one we're going to do is going to be the 4-pole, which is going to come through these two adapters here. We have part of the 4-pole here and that's going to plug into the vehicle side 4-pole on the other side of here. Now, in order to keep those together in order to keep them from coming undone, we went ahead and used a zip tie to squeeze them as well as some electrical tape to make sure we seal the connection so we don't get any electrical issues caused by water getting in there.So the next thing we're going to do is go ahead and ground our white wire. As you can see here, we just have it ran through here. We used a self-tapping screw into the vehicle's body. We're going to have a few more wires. We should have three wires left, a black wire, which is for the battery charge line, a blue wire, which is for the brake output and then a yellow wire, which is for the reverse lights. So keep in mind, a lot of trailers don't actually have this reverse light circuit. So we just went ahead and taped that off, but then we're going to take our black and our blue wires and we're going to attach them to the gray duplex wire that comes in our kit. If we look up here, we can actually see that duplex wire.So the blue duplex wire has a white and a black wire. I attached the black wire from the duplex wire to the black wire from our trailer connector, and then the white wire from the duplex wire to the blue wire from our trailer connector. So once we have those connected to the duplex wire, we went ahead and ran the duplex wire all the way up to the front of the vehicle. We'll show you the path we took for this.So a little tip when you're installing your 4-way, there's actually going to be a nice little grommet here right behind the rear wheel well in this little pocket. We actually just cut a slit in that grommet and then it allows us to pass our trailer connector from inside the vehicle where the factory tow package port is, and run the wiring harness down to the plug for our four to 7-way adapter.So here's how we got the duplex wire to the front of the vehicle. I actually used the ring clamp here just to hold it from falling down. We have it ran along here and then I actually have it ran over the subframe here. So we have it ran all the way at the top of the sub frame. And I'll be able to show you where we came out over here, but we're going to come down in this pocket here, which is right between the subframe and our gas tank. And basically what I did is I have it ran over this bracket to secure it. And then my first zip tie is actually going to be down here.So basically the rest of this install or for the rest of the length that we're running this wire, we're going to be zip tying our duplex wire to some existing panels, some existing wires and cables to keep it from falling down. But we have it ran above this little black plastic panel here all the way up to the front of the vehicle. Now we didn't actually remove this panel completely. There's going to be some 10-millimeter screws on the outside. There's two or three of them that we removed so we could drop down the panel. And then we just ran the wire on top of this panel all the way up to the front here.So once we get to the front of the vehicle here, about the midway point on this black panel right around this area here, we're going to need to separate our black and white wires. Because the white wire, which if you remember, we attached it to the blue wire from our trailer connector. That's going to be for the brake output circuit, and that actually needs to be run inside the cab of the vehicle.Now we'll show you a grommet next to show you how we got that white wire up inside the vehicle. But the other wire, the black wire, that's the battery charge line circuit, that needs to go to the vehicle's battery. So we continue to run that wire actually all the way to the front. And you can see where it just comes out of our black panel here. We have a couple of zip ties and basically what I did from there is I went ahead and ran that wire all the way up into the engine bay, pulled it through, and we'll show you that a little later.So we're inside the vehicle here. We're directly underneath the driver's side floorboard. So the first thing you're going to have to do is you're going to have to take out, there's going to be two panels. We have a kick panel, which is actually combined with our threshold panel. We need to remove both of those. It's super simple to do so. There's just going to be some push fasteners along here. And then one little hand nut will loosen by hand on the inside there.But once we have those panels removed, we can go ahead and peel up some of this fabric and our carpet. In about under this area here, sort of directly below this carpet around this area, we're going to have a grommet. So I went ahead and removed that grommet and I just fed our white wire from underneath up through that grommet, and pulled it into the cab here. So this wire is going to be for the brake output. We're actually going to attach this directly to our brake controller, to the blue wire on our brake controller to be exact.So we're up here in the engine bay now and we can just barely see our black wires that we have it snaked back on the backside of the firewall up into the engine bay. We can see them tie here to the cooler reservoir line and we basically just have it ran the backside of our fuse box here. And now you're going to notice our two circuit breakers. So we're only going to focus on one now, which is going to be our 40 amp circuit breaker. So we have our black wire that came from the trailer connector, and it's going to be ran to the auxiliary post on our circuit breaker, which is this bottom one here. We're going to attach that with a ring terminal. Again, this comes in the kit.So the other terminal in our circuit breaker, this top one, which is copper, this is going to be labeled battery, and this actually needs to be run to the positive battery terminal. So we'll trace this back down here using our butt connectors coming along here. And we actually have it ran to the stud here on the positive battery terminal. So this is going to be a 10-millimeter socket it takes to remove this and we'll attach it with the larger ring clamps. So you're going to get two different size of ring clamps. We're going to get this larger stud ones, which we have here, and then the smaller stud ones, which go to the circuit breaker.So that'll finish up our connections for our trailer connectors, but there are a couple more things we still need to do. The next one is going to be power to our brake controller. So essentially we're going to be doing a similar process to how we just did it with the battery charge line. We're going to first start by mounting either our 20 or 30 amp circuit breaker. For our Highlander here, 20 amps should be fine. So we go ahead and mount our circuit breaker. The top one here is again to the battery.We'll just do the same thing we did with the other circuit breaker, we're route this wire down here and then attach it to this stud here, which is the positive terminal on our battery. And then the other stud here, which is the auxiliary. What this needs to do is this actually needs to be run inside the cab of our vehicle, because this is going to be responsible for powering our brake controller. So for this one, we went ahead and just trace the wire that we did for the battery charge line back down through here, and then back down into the engine bay and down up underneath.So we have our black wire here. What I did is I just went ahead and ran it through the same grommet that we used earlier for our white wire. We have to peel back some of the carpet and there's going to be a grommet we'll punch out, sort of in this general area here. But then we can pull the power wire for our brake controller up inside the vehicle. And now we have both the power and ground that will connect to our brake controller. So now we have our black wire inside the cap here, which is for the power to our brake controller. We have our white wire here, which is going to be for the brake output. This will go to the blue are on the back of our brake controller and now we're going to have two other wires.We're going to have to use a ground wire, which is usually the white wire in the back of the brake controller. And then the stoplight switch circuit, which is the red wire on the back of the brake controller. Now, in order to obtain a stoplight switch circuit on this vehicle here, we need to reach up under our dash here and on the brake pedal, we need to take off the pigtail that attaches to the brake pedal. So in order to access the pigtail to our brake pedal, we're going to have a little panel here that needs to come out. There's going to be one screw here and one screw over here. Pretty easy to take out.But once we get that panel off, we're basically just going to reach our hand up in here and directly above the brake pedal, you're going to see the pigtail. Now, we're not really going to be able to show you this because it's really far back up in there. So here's what that pigtail looks like. That's the connector we're going to be undoing. Now the tabs for it are up here. They're pretty hard to reach. We're really only going to be able to do it with one hand. But before we pull that down, you're going to have these two other clips here and here, which attached to bracket up there right where the pigtail is. We'll need to remove those so we can pull this down some.But the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and splice off or remove some of this jacket here so we can begin testing our wires, and we know which circuit we need to splice into. So with our red wire here connected to the cold side of the brake pedal, which is our stoplight switch. We have our other two wires. And then finally, we just run a ground anywhere to a bare metal surface. And that'll complete the four connections we need to install a brake controller of our choosing.We're going to take our actual controller and we're going to find a place to mount it. Now really the only restriction we have is it needs to be parallel to the direction of travel, meaning we can't have it crooked like this or crooked like that. It needs to be parallel. So you can see here, this location is probably going to be our best bet. It's not going to interfere with our knee too much, sort of going to be out of the way, but it's still going to be within reach for us to manipulate the controls.So what we're going to do now is we have two options for mounting. We can use the traditional bracket, which you see here that comes with the kit, it screws into the side. Or we can use this other mounting bracket that comes here. It's a little bit of a cleaner install fit. Installs like this. Pushes into position and then there's actually going to be another bracket here, a smaller bracket, which is what we drill into the dash most likely around there, and then we mount it to this bracket here. So let's go ahead and drill this bracket now then we can mount the controller.Now, keep in mind, we do need to check behind this panel first, before we drill into it to make sure we're not drilling into anything and damaging it. We do have our airbag right here so we want to use extra precaution. So now in our kit here, we're going to get these tiny screws. We can go ahead and attach our two brackets here using these screws. So now we can take the pigtail, keep in mind, we're going to be using the separate pigtail that's specific for these Toyota vehicles as there's an integrated diode. We don't want to use a pigtail that actually comes with the brake controller, but we can go ahead and out and connect it to our connections we've made.Now your wire colors may look a little bit different. We ran the black. This is for the battery. This is for the 12 volt battery. This is going to go to the black wire on our harness. So this one will be color to color. The rest, however, are not all color to color. It really just depends on what color wires you used when you ran your circuits. But we'll go ahead and splice that on. We use this thick white wire for the brake output circuit. So that's the one we're going to attach to the blue wire.Our other white wire here is for the ground. We actually just made a little ground here on the inside of this panel with the ring terminal. Go ahead and attach this. And then the final connection will be red to red, which is for the stoplight switch circuit. And there we have it. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to go ahead and tape up these connections here, then I'm going to tuck the wiring harness under the dash and we'll plug it into the back of the brake controller to make sure everything works.So now once we have our crimps made, we have the two harnesses spliced together. All we did was route the wire up and along the top side of this panel here and to the back of our brake controller. Now, once we plug it into our brake controller, we should get this screen here, which lights up and lets us know everything was done correctly. So now with everything hooked up, we can begin testing all our circuits to make sure they're active. We're going to be using these little plug-in testers. We do sell these here at etrailer. If you have your trailer with you, you can use that as well. Just keep in mind, these testers are going to be preferred since they allow you to isolate an issue, a potential issue between the vehicle or trailer.So we have our running lights on already. As you can see, the lights on both testers are illuminated. Now we're going to do our brakes, our left turn, our right turn. So now that we've verified all the signals are working, let's go ahead and test the battery charge line and the brake output. As we can see, the battery charge line is going to be a constant on because it's wired directly to the battery. Let's go ahead and test our brake output circuit with our brake controller now. So there we go. Now we know everything's working correctly.And that will do it today for our look and installation of the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller here on our 2019 Toyota Highlander..