Arrives before Christmas To see if this custom-fit item will work for you please tell us what vehicle you'll use it with.
Towing? There's an app for that. This brake controller connects to your phone with Bluetooth so all your settings are right in your hand. The plug-and-play unit mounts under your dashboard, out of sight and out of your way.
Features:
Specs:
Pair with other OneControl systems for convenient control of your trailer in one app!
Quick Tip: The Bluetooth PIN for initially pairing to your smart device is located in the quick reference guide!
Note: If Bluetooth connection is lost, the brake controller will continue to function safely, using the most recently programmed settings. This brake controller is not compatible, but will not interfere, with Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.
The Curt Echo under-dash is all about convenience. With the main unit mounted out of sight beneath the dash, all you need is your smartphone to control the settings on the brake controller. You won't have to worry about banging your knee on a bulky controller, cluttering up your dash, or ruining the sleek look of your interior.
The Echo is unique for giving you control of your towing through your smartphone. You can set the maximum braking output, adjust the braking sensitivity, apply the manual override - all from the OneControl app.
The Echo connects to the app via Bluetooth. You can save multiple trailer profiles in the app, a big plus if you have a fleet and want to be able to just select a pre-set configuration and get towing. And don't worry: after you've downloaded the app, you don't need to have data on to use the app with the brake controller. You'll be able to receive calls and texts and access your other apps.
OneControl App
Simple, intuitive, and user-friendly, the OneControl App makes it wicked easy to manage your settings and control your trailer.
1. Manual Override
This big orange button in the middle of the app is your manual override. Press and hold the button, and the brake controller will smoothly apply the trailer brakes without applying your vehicle's brakes. This is perfect for stopping sway or controlling your trailer's momentum in an emergency.
Quick tip: Put manual override right at your fingertips by adding this button (C83HR - sold separately) to your dash. The app must be running for the button to work, but it can be in the background while you use other apps on your phone. The button has an adhesive back and runs on a replaceable battery.
2. Brake Output Indicator
The outer ring gives you a visual indicator of how much power is being applied to the trailer brakes. This is determined by your max output setting.
3. Max Output
Braking output 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.
To set your maximum braking output, tap this button and increase or decrease using the + and - buttons. You want to set the braking output as high as you can without locking up the brakes.
4. Sensitivity Level
This controls the aggressiveness of your trailer's braking, meaning how quickly the brakes reach the max output level. This is a great adjustment to make when you're towing a heavy load and the trailer will need more umph to bring it to a stop so it doesn't push your vehicle forward.
Just like max output, if you need to change your sensitivity level, use the + and - buttons. If your vehicle takes too long to come to a stop, increase the setting. If it stops too abruptly, lower the setting. You may also need to adjust the sensitivity based on your own preferences, or when the trailer load or road conditions change.
5. Vehicle Hazard Lights
If you turn on your vehicle's hazard lights, there's a chance the trailer brakes will pulse on and off as the lights flash. Turn this setting on any time you activate your hazard lights to prevent this problem.
Save Multiple Trailer Profiles
Get on the road faster by saving your settings. With the app, you can add and store multiple profiles for both trailers and vehicles so that your preferred settings will be ready to go as soon as you hook up. This is perfect if you own a fleet and don't want to have to reset the controller every time you swap out trailers. You'll have the ideal settings saved and waiting for you. To switch between profiles, just swipe left or right.
If you like the idea of monitoring your trailer from your phone, the other OneControl systems could be a great fit for you.
The Curt True Course (C94VV - sold separately) is an advanced Bluetooth sway control system that automatically triggers the trailer brakes (independent of the vehicle's brakes and the brake controller) when it detects dangerous trailer movement. The Curt Tire Linc (C54VV - sold separately) Bluetooth TPMS monitors the temperature and pressure of your trailer tires. All of these systems use the OneControl app so you can manage all of them in the same place on your phone.
You won't be banging your knee on a bulky brake controller or interfering with your vehicle's lower airbags because the main unit mounts out of sight under your dash. This product comes with an adhesive pad and 4 zip ties to make it easy to mount anywhere. (Just don't zip-tie the box to wiring or cables that can shift as you drive!) Thanks to the 3-axis accelerometer, the main unit can be positioned at any angle. No matter how you install it, the unit will sense the direction of travel and deliver smooth, even braking.
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 your factory port, just plug the other end of the adapter into the Echo. No hardwiring needed!
Once that's done, download the OneControl app on your Apple or Android smartphone and wirelessly pair the unit to your phone via Bluetooth, following the in-app instructions. It should take about 5 seconds for them to pair. Once paired, the LED light on the unit will turn a solid blue. Plug in your trailer's 7-way and let the whole system calibrate for another 5 seconds. When the LED turns green, configure your desired trailer brake settings and save it as a profile. Then you're ready to tow!
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 controller 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 hard; 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 Echo under-dash 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 ensure that your trailer slows 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 everyone, Ryan here at Etrailer. Today we're gonna be showing you how to install the CURT under dash trailer brake controller in conjunction with the CURT adapter plug on our 2021 Ford Explorer. But before we get into that, let's take a minute, check it out and make sure it's gonna work for you. With the Explorer being a full-sized SUV, you know they're capable vehicles and people use 'em to do a lot of different things, which does include pulling some larger trailers around. And if your trailer has brakes on it, you're gonna need a way to apply the brakes, and that's exactly what a trailer brake controller is gonna do. You know, whenever you hit the brake in your Explorer, it's going to send power back to the trailer's brakes, applying those, helping you slow down in a safe manner.
And first and foremost, one of the big things that kind of separates this brake controller from a lot of the others is it's wireless and it's gonna be completely hidden. Everything lives up underneath the dash, and so you're not gonna see anything on your dashboard at all. As compared to some of the other style of brake controllers, I like to call 'em traditional styles, or it's something like this, which would require you to mount that up in an area, you know, somewhere in here. So while that might not bother some people, other people might not be so fond of having to live with a brake controller in this area. And so that's what the CURT one here is going to help solve.
This is gonna work with trailers that have up to four axles. So regardless on what you're pulling with your Explorer, this is gonna work, as well as it'll work with trailers that have electric brakes and electric over hydraulic, if your set up is like that. And this is gonna be a proportional style brake controller too, which that's what I usually recommend 99% of the time. And I say it because it just, it usually makes for a more smooth braking transition and a better towing experience. And so how that's gonna work is whenever you hit the brake in your Explorer, let's say for you're rolling up to a stop sign or something and you're halfway on that brake pedal, the trailer brakes are gonna respond the same way.
On the other hand, if, you know, if there's an accident up ahead or something, you have to stand on that brake pedal and slow things down as fast as possible, the trailer is going to do the same thing. And so you're stopping as almost one cohesive unit and you shouldn't really have to worry too much about, you know, the trailer kind of dragging you back or pushing you forward whenever you're slowing down. As far as the app goes that you'll use to actually, you know, operate the brake controller, pretty self-explanatory, you know, nothing too crazy there. It's gonna work with all the, you know, popular mobile devices and whatnot. Today we have an iPad here.
But a normal phone will work as well, just like this so we can actually see a little bit better. And it really lets you customize a lot of things. So you have several profiles to choose from if you wanna set 'em up that way. You know, if you tow multiple trailers, you can dial the settings in and save 'em so you don't have to do it the next time. And that's what you're gonna see, essentially, whenever you're hooked up to your trailer, and you know, towing your vehicle down the road. So, you know, whenever we hit the brake pedal here, I'm just hooked up to a test box simulating a trailer now. You know, when that blue bar starts to show up, you know the power's being sent back there. And you can change a couple things too. So your output, you know, you can dial that up if you want to, to send more power back there. So for example, let's say if your trailer's unloaded to start with, you probably don't need a bunch of extra help. You know, you can turn that down. On the other hand, once you're loaded up, if you feel like you need more braking power back there, you can always ramp that up a little bit and dial that in. And the same thing with the sensitivity. That's just going to kind of determine how sensitive the brakes are and, you know, how fast almost they come on. As far as the manual override, you can push down on this button, and that will apply just the trailer brakes. So you generally use that in the event of sway situation. If the trailer starts to kind of get away from you a little bit, you can hit that, slow adjust the trailer down and get things right and true again behind you. If you'd rather have something different, CURT does offer a wireless button. It's maybe about the size of a maybe a quarter, and you can stick it to the dash and have that be an option for you as well if that's something you'd rather have. And a lot of people wonder, myself included when I first learned about this, is, okay, what happens if your phone or your mobile device dies, or you know, you click out of the app, or whatever the case may be. And if that happens, it's not a huge deal, because whatever settings you have like this, so say if we had it set up like this and this ended up dying, or you know, one of the kids close the app out, or whatever the case may be, it'll save and remember those settings. So if something like that we're to happen, your trailer's brakes are still gonna work. Other than that, at the end of the day, a really nice brake controller setup. You know, I really like the fact that it's wireless. We've had a lot of good luck with the CURT wireless brake controllers in terms of communication and ease of use and things like that. You really don't run into too many issues there at all. And, you know, it's gonna do pretty much whatever you want it to, and you're not gonna have to live with a traditional brake controller being bolted up, or mounted rather, to your dashboard. As far as the installation goes, it can either be extremely simple or more time-consuming, and that's just really gonna depend on how your Explorer's already set up. So in our case today we have a factory tow package, meaning that we have the seven-way trailer connector already on the back of our Ford. And underneath of our dash, there's a factory connector plug that we can utilize to plug our brake controller in and send, you know, those wires are connected, they'll send everything back to our seven-way, to our trailer. And so in our scenario, essentially we plugged it in. I made a little bracket to mount up our brake controller, and that was really about it. If your vehicle is not set up like that, meaning you don't have that factory seven-way round connector back there, there's a couple other things that you're gonna have to do. And this is gonna hold true with, you know, other brands of brake controllers too. You're gonna have to start out with a four-way flat wiring kit. So CURT actually offers one. You'll get that set up. And then you can use Etrailer's universal brake controller install kit to kind of complete that package, if you will. Gives you all the wires and stuff you'll have to run up here and get everything sorted. But you know, with a lot of these Explorers, you know, most of 'em already have that tow package back there, and so definitely worth looking into before we get going on this. But hopefully we can help give you some ideas and some guidance. And with that said, why don't we go ahead and get started on it now. To you begin our installation, we're gonna be working here on the driver's side of our Explorer. And underneath of the dash, there's gonna be a panel that we need to remove to gain access to our connector plug. So I removed that panel. Just almost easier to show it like this as opposed to underneath the dash, just 'cause there's not a ton of room under there. But this is what it looks like, and there's gonna be several fasteners along the firewall. So this will be closest to the front of your vehicle. You're gonna have a 10 millimeter head nut just like that silver one there. So you can undo that. And then kinda in this pocket, so that'll be on the kind of towards the passenger side in that pocket, you'll have another 10 millimeter head bolt, and some cases this push pin will be there. If you have this push pin, you can just take a flathead screwdriver, pry underneath the head of it, and that'll usually get it to release. Then there's two more screws. So kind of closer to the outside of our vehicle right here, you'll have two seven millimeter head screws. So once you get all of them out, you know, this will just pop down out of the way, giving us access to that connector plug. So almost in the dead center of a dash here, kind of by our brake pedal arm, here's this connector plug. And it might be kind of tight up just underneath there. You can reach up there and pull it off the plastic piece and get it to come down like this. So that's what we're looking for. And it's gonna have a dummy plug in it, which is just a cap to protect the terminals. So nothing's plugged into it now. We'll need to remove that dummy plug, so you can just kinda lift up on that tab and pull this out. And we can get rid of this as we're not gonna be reusing it. What we're able to do now is grab our adapter plug, and this is simply just going to plug right into that factory connection. And it'll only go in one way, so we don't pop right in, you know, turn the connector the other direction or whatever, and just push it right into position. At this point, we can mount up our brake controller, and there's a couple of ways you can do this. What I've done is just made some brackets here, that I attach a brake controller to, and then the bracket's gonna go over some factory studs underneath the dash. And there's plenty of room under there to do it a different way. Ideally I'm doing this because we can actually kind of see what's going on. It's just so tight under there. But they do give you some sticky tape and things like that where you can mount this to a flat surface or come up with a bracket, whatever you want to do. It can be positioned in any orientation. It doesn't really matter there, as long as it's on something secure. You know, you want to avoid zip tying this to a little bundle of wire or something that can bounce around and cause us to lose calibration. So we'll take a look under the dash, it's essentially right above our gas pedal, and show you how we're gonna do this. I got our controller bolted up under the dash here. And like I said, it's essentially just right above our gas pedal. And there's two studs that come out of the firewall, and I just utilize them. I slid our bracket over it, and I did have to get my own nuts to put on them studs. I believe they we're M6 by 1.0. So if this is something you wanna make, that's the hardware that you can use to get that secured down. At this point, we can just take the adapter plug that we plugged into our factory harness and plug that right into the plug that's coming right out of our brake controller. This is snapping together. And before we go any further, you know, straightening up the wiring and putting our panel back and stuff, I think it's a good idea to kind of test everything and check it out and make sure it's working properly. Ideally what you'd want to do now is plug into your trailer, plug your trailer into your vehicle, rather. I have a test box here that simulates a trailer. Probably not gonna have one of these. And something to think about, you know, if your trailer happens to have any issues with it, it might mislead you into thinking it's something you did on the vehicle side. So just something to keep in mind. You're able to sync up your mobile device now to the brake controller. And so put your vehicle on accessory or start it, and take your mobile device, turn your Bluetooth on, and you'll download the app right So they give you a QR code, download that. And essentially from there it just does it for you. It kind of prompts you along, and eventually you should be able to pop up on your device list here, the brake controller, and we'll connect to it. That way we can kind of test everything and make sure it's set up right. Now that you're paired up, you know, you can just click a profile. And what we can do, we can push down on our brake pedal on the vehicle here. You can see that the brakes are being applied. So we know power is getting sent back there. You can even hold down the manual override button. You can see the power is getting sent back to the trailer. So I think we're in pretty good shape. Everything seems like it's working properly. We'll go ahead and kind of zip tie up our wiring under the dash now and and get that panel put back on. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the CURT under dash trailer brake controller on our 2021 Ford Explorer.
Very nice product and well laid out. Came with everything to make the job easy.
Easy setup and operation.
Would not connect to Blue Tooth after install and app download. This seems to be a trend with these controllers,from what I was told.E-Trailer provided a return label.
Good product. Small size. App could have been easier to setup.
Very pleased with the ease of install and how it functions.
Easy installation and product works exactly as it should.
I have to say, the unit works pretty well... Took some adjusting at first and sometimes have to still make small adjustments when the trailer brakes grab a little to much while coming to a stop. Easy installation and setup and does the job.
The Curt wiring adapter was fine, however our coach was not wired with a plug in the harness, so installation required a little wiring work to complete. No big issue, the product was great
The break controller worked seamlessly. Profiles are easy to set up and it has very reliable Bluetooth connectivity with my phone. Installation was really easy on my Honda Pilot!
Everything was as described. Easy easy installation in 10 minutes. Not the top of the line controller but it's all I need. Very fast shipping as well. Couldn't be more happy with etrailer. I will be purchasing my fifth through etrailer soon!
Although this seems like a great idea, the controller app from Curt/Lippert only works on a very recent cell phone or on an Android-based car stereo head unit. There are no factory Android car stereos available or aftermarket Android head units from the major players such as Pioneer, JVC, Kenwood, Alpine. The app is not Apple Car Kit or Android Auto enabled. This basically means you need to play with your cell phone while driving to adjust the brake controller. Even touching your phone while driving is illegal in many, many states. It really doesn't matter how good or bad the brake controller is if you can't use it. The same app is used for other Curt/Lippert Bluetooth Echo brake controllers and for their anti-sway controller and trailer tire pressure monitors. One has to wonder why this is even available for sale. I plan to simply avoid all Curt/Lippert Bluetooth trailer equipment in the future.
Do not buy either the Curt Under-Dash or plug-in Wireless brake controllers until Lippert fixes the phone app. I’ve used both happily with the old ECHO Smart Control app. I could use the remote manual button with the phone app not even running. As one would reasonably expect the button talked to the controller directly via Bluetooth. The new OneControl Auto app must be running and in the foreground to use the manual remote! And the most recent version of ECHO Smart Control is non-functional, it just tells you to install OneControl Auto.
This is my first proportional brake controller. Stopping is much smoother without sacrificing safety. Communication by bluetooth makes for a clean installation.
Don’t even know it’s there, set it and forget it.
Easy to install. Very happy withth it.
Great job came on time. Installed easily. Works great. Better still is the service from etrailer. New what I needed for my truck. Deserves repeat business
Easy install.
Plugged right in to my expeditions factory plug quick easy install.
Installation pics on my Ford F-150
Excellent. Perfect fit, exactly what was needed. Connected the Curt C51110 Brake control to factory wiring. Only thing that could make it better is if it came with someone to plug it in for me and save me 10 seconds.
This was relatively easy to install under the dash of our 2021 Jeep Grand Cherokee, especially since ours has the factory Trailer Tow Package and therefore an existing pigtail connector ready to connect to the brake controller. The Curt wiring adapter made it super easy to connect the Brake Controller to the vehicle's wiring harness. The controller was easy to calibrate and worked seamlessly while we're towing a rented trailer. We used a dedicated (older) cell phone to operate it while we're towing to avoid any potential interference from other apps rather than using our regular phone on which we receive phone calls texts, etc. This was our first time towing a trailer and this easy-to-use Brake Controller helped make us feel safe and comfortable. Highly recommended.
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