To see if this custom-fit item will work for you please tell us what vehicle you'll use it with.
The Tekonsha P3 is a brake controller beloved for its reliability and useability. You're able to save your settings and multiple profiles. It's easy to install, and with the custom harness, it's plug-and-play.
Features:
Specs:
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. You want to go as high as you can without the trailer brakes locking up.
Use the arrow buttons on the front of the module to set the output.
The boost setting 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.
Depending on the level of boost, your trailer brakes can start at either 13 percent or 25 percent of the set braking output. So instead of starting at 0, the brakes will start at 25 percent and get to 100 percent sooner. This keeps the trailer from pushing your tow vehicle forward.
Boost Levels:
| Approximate Gross Trailer Weight | Boost Level | Increase in Initial Power Output |
|---|---|---|
| Less than tow vehicle GVW | B1 | 13% |
| Equal to tow vehicle GVW | B1 or B2 | 13% or 25% |
| Up to 25% more than tow vehicle GVW | B2 or B3* | 25% |
| Up to 40% more than tow vehicle GVW | B3* | 25% |
*Both B2 and B3 offer a 25-percent boost in initial power. But the braking curve for B3 is more aggressive than that of B2. This means that, even though you will start out with the same intensity when using these boost levels, you will get an overall more aggressive braking experience with the higher level. So if you use B3, you will reach maximum braking sooner than if you use B2.
To engage the manual override, twist the rotary-style lever from right to left. This will activate the trailer's brakes and brake lights independently of your vehicle, great for stopping sway or controlling your trailer's momentum in an emergency.
The P3 is able to store your settings in multiple profiles so that you can have them ready to go for different trailers and drivers. Even the display is super customizable: you can change the screen color, brightness, and language to make it easy to use.
The P3 makes it easy to troubleshoot problems as they come up, with comprehensible and detailed diagnostics displayed on the screen.
Diagnostic troubleshooting messages include:
Diagnostic warning signs include:
The Prodigy P3 offers advanced safety features to prevent damage to various components of your towing setup.
-Integrated reverse battery protection shields the brake controller and your trailer's breakaway system from shorts.
-When the P3 is not in use, it draws only 3.6 milliamps, minimizing drain on your vehicle's battery.
-Any time your vehicle and trailer are at a standstill with the brakes applied for more than 5 seconds, the hold feature will kick on and reduce power to just 25 percent. This will keep your trailer in place without your brakes overheating.
Installing the P3 is incredibly simple. You'll mount the bracket to your dashboard then mount the unit to the bracket. Plug the custom harness into your vehicle and into the unit. Done!
Keep in mind that the P3 must be horizontally level and parallel with the direction of travel to work correctly.
With a replacement wiring harness (sold separately) and replacement bracket (TK5906 - sold separately), you can even transfer the Prodigy P3 to another vehicle.
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, 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 and trailer.
The Prodigy P3 uses an internal inertia sensor to detect 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, everybody. How's it going Today, we're gonna be going over and showing you how to install the Tekonsha P3 Prodigy Trailer Brake Controller, here on a 2018 Honda Pilot. So this is what our brake controller looks like installed on our vehicle here. Now, we do have some freedom in regards to mounting, but the best place and I would say the vast majority of the time we're gonna be mounting them about where our right knee would be. So at the seat in a normal position at my foot on the brake and the gas here, as you can see, I'm about six foot. I still have plenty of room here with my leg.
I don't have to worry about hitting that brake controller. So although it does take up a little bit of room, I don't really see that being a problem for most people. So if you are a taller person, you do want some more leg room, we can actually easily remove this braking controller due to the mounting system here. So say, we're not towing most of the time, we probably don't want the brake controller down there. Keep in mind, we will lose all of our presets if we pull power to it, but it's still gonna give us much more room and it's super easy.
Simply lift up on these two tabs on the outside. We can pull the brake controller off and then we can just release the tabs from the back to remove our brake controller completely. And we'd obviously just tuck this wiring harness up under the dash here, but this is how we can have our vehicles set up when we're just riding around town and not towing. So again, keep in mind, if we do pull power from the brake controller each time we want to remove it from the vehicle, we will lose our factory presets. What I mean by that is the Tekonsha Prodigy allows you to store settings for a few different trailers.
So if we just wanna get in each time and have everything set up for that trailer we would just simply select that. We would need to go through that process again, if we did pull power from the unit. And really, the choice is up to you. Whether you want the added leg room or you want the convenience of saving your trailer settings. So one of the great things about the P3, it's super customizable and there's tons of settings we can play with to really suit everything for our particular application.
So here's gonna be the main screen when we don't have a trailer plugged in. Yeah, we want to go through some of the settings in the menu option. We'll hit this bottom in the bottom right. This button in the bottom right. We can use the up and down arrows to go through our settings. So this is the display setting, we hit okay on that. You can see where we can change the brightness of the backlight. So for driving at night, we may want to put that down to low, so it's not blinding us. What if it's super bright in the daytime maybe we need to bump that up a little bit to give us better visibility, but once we select the brightness, we can hit, Okay. It comes preset to normal. So if we hit that again, we can actually go ahead and select our brake type. So this brings up a good point about the Prodigy P3. It's really one of the top of the line brake controller options on the market. So if you have a trailer with electric over hydraulic brakes, meaning the brakes are actually hydraulic and it's controlled by electric actuator. A lot of brake controllers are not actually compatible with this type of braking system. The P3, however, is so all you would need to do is go down to brake type and then select that option. Electric brakes, just standard or hydraulic. Confirm that, go back to our settings. Most trailers are electric so that's where we're gonna leave it. So keep in mind, when we don't have a trailer plugged in, you will see that screen flash. So if we go further into Display's, another cool unique feature of the P3 we can actually change the color of the backlight. You can see all the options we have for that here. So once we plug in a trailer, this is the screen we're gonna be prompted with. So before we take off down the road, we would you wanna to adjust the settings for one of our trailers here. Now, if we have multiple trailers, we talked about it a little bit earlier, but we can actually store those settings into the unit here up to five different trailers. And basically, what you're gonna be storing is the output which you can see is easily adjustable using these arrows on the side here. So for our heavier trailers, we're obviously gonna want a little bit more braking force or as opposed to with just our lighter trailers, We don't want them locking up every time we stop. So we can easily adjust the output here, hit okay to save that. But this is pretty much gonna be what the screen looks like while we're driving down the road. So on the bottom of our unit here, I'm sure you're familiar with this. It's a standard manual override feature, sends full power to the brakes, depending on what setting we have. And it's obviously gonna work with our brake pedal as well. Keep in mind, this is a proportional brake controller. So when we are just testing it sitting still, we shouldn't see much power at all. That's completely normal. We do get a lot of questions about that. People step on the brakes. They say, "Oh, I'm only getting 1.9." that's because we're sitting still, it's a proportional brake controller. So it's not gonna send that much power. So in regards to choosing an electric brake controller for your vehicle here, if your trailer has electric brakes, we're obviously gonna need a brake controller to activate them. Now, keep in mind, when you're installing electric brake controller on your vehicle, you will need to have a 7-way in place. Now, there is an option for this vehicle to come with the factory 7-way, but if you don't, we have options to get you set up with one. But once we get that 7-way on there, we can choose a brake controller. Now, the Tekonsha Prodigy P3, it's an excellent option. It's probably one of the most highly regarded brake controllers on the market. It's been around for a long time and it's super durable. So it's actually, what's known as a proportional brake controller. So there's kind of two main types here. We have the time delay brake controllers and we have the proportional brake controllers. So time delay is a little bit older technology. And basically, how that works is there's gonna be a little bit of a delay between when we step on our brakes and when the brakes ramp up on the trailer, but the proportional brake controller like the P3, we're not gonna have that issue at all. Our brakes are going to come on immediately as soon as we press them. Furthermore, since it's proportional, the amount of braking force that's sent to our trailer is gonna be relative to how we're applying the brakes in the vehicle. So let's say, we really slam on a stop here. We're on the highway, somebody cuts in front of us, we really need to come to a fast, slow, effective stop and we really press on those brakes, we're gonna get a ton of braking force sent to our trailer. Now, as opposed to we're just moseying around in town, we're just coming to a stop at a stoplight, we definitely don't want to lock up the brakes on our trailer. So we're just gonna come to a smooth, slow, effective stop. So if you're familiar with heavy duty towing, you'll be glad to know that the P3 has integrated boost settings. We have three different settings, B1, B2 and B3. So you can see there, we have a letter followed by a numeric value here in the top right-hand corner of the screen. And we can easily toggle through those with the button here to turn it off or we can go to one, two or three. So last but not the least, the P3 has internal safeguards as well as internal troubleshooting codes. Now, what I mean by this is in regards to these safeguards, it's not uncommon to have issues with the wiring on your trailer and sometimes those can carry over to the vehicle and cause problems if you're not properly set up, but with the P3 it's gonna act as sort of an intermediate between the trailer and the vehicle. It's gonna stop any issues from the trailer affecting our vehicle here. Now, if there is an issue, we have these easy to read troubleshooting codes that's gonna allow us to quickly identify and fix that. So the first step of our installation, we need to find a place to mount our brake controller. Now, it doesn't exactly matter where we put this or a few things we need to keep in mind, the orientation of the brake controller, it can be like that, or it can be like that, but we can't have it pointed side to side. So the angle or degree rather doesn't matter, but the orientation as far as that way goes does. It needs to be parallel with the direction of travel. So there's not a ton of places in this vehicle here, but I would say more often than not where we end up mounting these things is gonna be right around where your right knee would sit. So somewhere in there, you usually don't have too many issues. Some people like to mount them over here on the left-hand side, but you can actually hit your knee on that quite often, getting in and out of the vehicle. So the optimal place for the vast majority of vehicles is gonna be right over here. So once we have the correct location, we can choose between our two mounting brackets. So this is more of the traditional mounting bracket. It simply screws into the bottom of the dash with those two holes there and then we attach it to the brake controller with the side. So the other mounting bracket is the one that we have attached here and also used in conjunction with this little piece. So this is the piece that actually gets screwed into the dash. But what I like about this option here is you can actually easily remove the brake controller from this little pocket shell by simply just popping it out like that. So if you see yourself to be removing the brake controller maybe just to give you a little bit more room when you're not towing, this is definitely the way to go regardless, I would probably recommend this option. So what we're gonna to do now is since we're using this set of brackets, we're gonna take this little bracket here. We're gonna take two of the self tapping screws here and we're just gonna fix that into position over here where our right knee would be. So once we get a good location here, we're about where our right knee would be directly below the steering column further to the right side on this panel here. You want to make sure you peel that panel back to make sure you don't have anything behind there. We just have some metal brackets which shouldn't get in the way. We'll go ahead and attach our bracket now. So we're gonna want to leave one of them kind of loose until we get the other one in and then we can snug them both down. Make sure you have the correct angle. So now we're gonna take our brake controller out of our bracket here. And then these two little prongs here, we're gonna slide between the two planters on that metal bracket we just mounted. Then in your kit here, you're gonna get these two screws that looked like this. One will go on each side once you line up the holes. So you don't want to tighten down these two screws fully until you get the correct angle. So this bracket can actually pivot inside that metal bracket until you can get the correct viewing angle. Now you're just gonna wanna play with it a little bit while you're sitting in the driver's seat until you can get to where you can see everything and you can reach the controls. And then once you do get it in the perfect spot for you, then you can go ahead and just snug up those two screws on the side. So now we'll just take our brake controller and simply slide it into the bracket and press it up until we hear it lock into place. So now we have the brake controller mounted, the next thing we need to do is address the wiring. So for this particular vehicle here, Honda Pilot, we're gonna to have two different options and it's gonna be based on whether or not our vehicle came equipped with the factory 7-way trailer connector. Now the good news is if your vehicle did come equipped with the factory 7-way trailer connector, we are gonna need an additional harness. It's going to be this Tekonsha one you see here. And this is basically a plug and play adapter. This end here plugs into the back of our brake controller and then this other end here with a gray connector that's gonna to plug into a tow package port under the dash from the vehicle. And we'll show you that in a little bit. But the other option here is the hard wire harness. Now this one actually comes with your brake controller. So this is gonna be for models that don't come equipped with the factory 7-way trailer connector. Because if you don't have the factory 7-way trailer connector, chances are, you're not gonna have that tow package port under your dash. Therefore, you'd actually need to hardwire in the brake controller. So this method, it's a little bit more involved admittedly and you will need some additional parts such as a 4-way and a 4 to 7-way adapter. We carry both of those here at etrailer. But just a general run down for the hardwire application, this red wire here, this goes to the stoplight switch circuit. The cold side of that, you'll need to splice into a wire on the actual brake pedal. The blue wire here, this is the brake output circuit. This is gonna run to the 7-way on the back of your vehicle. The white wire is a ground that will simply be attached to the negative battery terminal or just a suitable ground within the vehicle. And then finally, the black wires for power. This will actually attach to the positive terminal on the battery with this circuit breaker in between. Now, if you ordered the etrailer 4 to 7-way adapter kit, it's gonna come with all the rest of the connections you need to install this, but for this particular application luckily, it has the factory 7-way. So we're just gonna simply be using this plug and play harness. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this black connector here. We're simply gonna plug that into the back of our brake controller. So we went ahead and just took our brake controller out of the pocket so we can show you this connection a little better. So here's what it looks like on the back of the brake controller and it literally only goes in one way. So you really can't mess this up. Just push it into here at click. Now we'll go ahead and slide the brake controller back in our mounting bracket. So now the other end here of our harness with that gray connector, that's gonna go to the factory port. So the locations for the factory port as far as on the vehicle side, these can vary slightly just a little bit. For our particular one, it's gonna be right over here, next to our emergency brake pedal. So we have this little panel here that has the hood latch release and it's actually gonna be right up in that area there. It's gonna simply match the end of that connector. So pretty much the male side or the female side of this connector is what we're gonna be looking for. We'll try to give you a little bit better view of that now. So right between my two fingers up here, maybe kind of hard to see, but we're pretty much just have that same gray connector that matches the end of the one we just showed you. So what we're gonna do now, we're just gonna reach up under the dash there and just connect this to our aftermarket harness. So once we have our connection made, it's kind of hard to reach up there, but with a little bit of patience, you guys should be able to get it no problem. You can see we have some extra harness here hanging down where our pedals would be. That's obviously not good. So we'll go ahead and just take a couple zip ties. We'll just tie it up under the dash there just some existing wiring. So once we plug in the harness to our brake controller this is the screen we should see. This is just the home screen here. You can see we have this nice backlight up here, displays, Tekonsha P3. So if you don't get this screen here, basically, if the brake controller doesn't power on once we plug in the harnesses, we're gonna need to check under the hood for some fuses and we can show you why now. So if we come under the hood here, we're gonna locate the fuse box cover which looks like this. It's located right here on the backside of the firewall. So we're gonna have three little tabs, two on the bottom, one on the top. We'll need to press those and we can remove this. So if we look on this intersection of fuses here, if your brake controller doesn't power on, chances are you're gonna be missing this outside 20 amp here and this outside 20 amp here, so these are micro fuses. And again, if your brake controller doesn't power on, you'll need to go ahead and insert a 20 amp fuse into each of these locations. Now for our particular application, our brake controller didn't turn on while we plugged everything in, so we actually did need to take two 20 amp fuses. Keep in mind these don't come in your kit, but you can find them at most local auto parts stores. Now, if you want to get this done ahead of time before you order your brake controller and you will want to come up here and check just to make sure you have those two fuses. If not just simply run to the store, pick a couple up, they're very cost-effective. And that's gonna do it today for our look and installation of the Tekonsha Prodigy P3 Trailer Brake Controller here on a 2018 Honda Pilot..
Info for this part was:
At etrailer.com we provide the best information available about the products we sell. We take the quality of our information seriously so that you can get the right part the first time.
Thank you! Your comment has been submitted successfully. You should be able to view your question/comment here within a few days.
Error submitting comment. Please try again momentarily.