Video Transcript for Beginner’s Guide to Installing the EcoHitch Stealth Trailer Hitch Receiver on a 2014 BMW X1

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today, on our 2014 BMW X1, we're gonna be showing you how to install the EcoHitch trailer hitch receiver. But before we do that, why don't we check it out and make sure that this is gonna be the right hitch for you. When it comes to picking out a hitch for your BMW, there's a handful of different options available. And if it we're me, just kinda thinking, okay, if I had a bimmer and I'm wanting to put a hitch on it, what would probably be the most important thing And immediately, what comes to my mind is the way it's gonna look. Really nice-looking vehicles.

And to me, I wouldn't want a hitch on there that would be ugly, hanging down and just a big eye sore. And with this one, that's not the case. The only thing you're gonna be able to see is the receiver tube opening. And I think it looks pretty clean actually. And I believe that's the case for all the hitches available for the BMW.

You know, that's really the only thing you're gonna see. But with that said, one of the big things that separates this one from some of the others is the fact that you can actually remove this receiver tube, so this part here. So, you can pull one bolt out, this will slide down and then you won't be able to see anything at all. You won't be able to tell that there's a hitch on there and it'll have a complete factory-type appearance. So, when you're ready to actually remove the receiver tube, it's not super hard but not super quick by any means.

There's one bolt that we have to pull out. And it's a 15/16 size socket you're gonna use. It doesn't come with the tool to do this. If you need one, though, you can grab here at etrailer. And so, you'll pull this out and this is what's holding it in place.

So, if it we're me, I'd use my hitch a lot. You know, it don't look bad the way it is, I'd probably just leave it in here. But with that said, in the off-season or if you don't really plan on using the hitch for a while or something along those lines, that's probably when I'd pull it out. So, you pull this out and this slides down and then you can keep this in the back seat or in your garage or whatever you wanna do with it. So, a good visual here, whenever you have the receiver tube out, this is what the back of your BMW is gonna look like. Completely factory. You're not even gonna be able to tell anything is there. There is another hitch available that does something really similar to this. And that's called the Stealth Hitch. It's a little bit easier to get the receiver tube in and out. You don't need a tool, you can just do it by hand, so a small advantage there. But with that said, this EcoHitch is a little more versatile in what you can do with it. And I say that because with the Stealth Hitch, you get your receiver tube, so this piece here. And with just this piece in there, you can't actually tow with it. You can only use accessories, like a bike rack or a cargo carrier. If you're wanting to do any towing, you would have to get their tow package. And it's a special type of ball mount that plugs up into the hitch. And whenever you use that, that's what's gonna allow you to tow. So, that's not the case with EcoHitch. With this one, you can use accessories, with this one piece, or put your regular, classic ball mount in there and tow your trailers around as well. One thing I do like about this setup is the clearance that it's gonna give us. So, not only ground clearance, it sits up nice and tight against the bottom of our vehicle, but also bumper clearance. And I know I see a lot of vehicles like this using accessories, particularly bike racks. And a lot of the times, those bike racks are gonna be able to fold up. And if you don't have the proper clearance, you're not gonna be able to fold them up and use that feature. And so, there shouldn't be any issues at all with this particular hitch. The receiver tube comes out a little ways. And honestly, it's pretty much about flush with the back of our bumper here. So, what that's gonna allow you to do is fold that accessory upright and not have to worry about it contacting the back of your BMW. The hitch is going to have a opening of two inches by two inches. So, this is a really common size. Arguably, the most common size, so a lot of different things are gonna work with it. At the end, you're gonna have a reinforced collar for a little bit of extra support. And it is going to use that standard 5/8 pin and clip. Keep in mind though, hitch doesn't come in, or I'm sorry, a pin and clip doesn't come included with the hitch. But if you need one, not a big deal, you can grab it right here at etrailer. So, one of the setbacks, if you will, about this hitch is the safety chain openings. They're gonna sit back little ways and up somewhat high. They're gonna be a plate-style. And the openings aren't huge. But they are gonna give you enough space to use just about any size hook. Kinda tricky getting it in there but honestly, that's just kinda one of the sacrifices you're gonna have to kinda deal with to be able to have it look good. So, the trade off is definitely worth it to me. Every now and again, I have to kinda fight this a little bit more. But consistently, you have the nice appearance on the back of our X1. As far as the hitch's weight capacities goes, it's gonna have some decent numbers. The maximum gross tongue weight rating is gonna be 300 pounds. And that's gonna be the amount of weight that's pushing down on the hitch. So, that's good for those one to three, maybe even four bike racks, depending on the weight of your bikes, to just kinda give you an example. As far as hitch's maximum gross trailer weight rating goes, that's gonna be 2,000 pounds. And that's gonna be the amount of weight that is pulling on the hitch. So, the weight of your trailer, plus anything that you might have on it. I do always like to suggest so, it's never a bad idea, just to grab your BMW's owner's manual. That way, you can make sure your X1 can pull that much weight safely. And if you are gonna be pulling a trailer, you're gonna want the lights to work on it, you know. That way, everyone around you knows what's going on and you'll be safe and legal. And to accomplish that, I'd recommend grabbing the Curt wiring kit and that'll get that job done. Now, let's just go ahead and grab a couple of measurements. That way, we could try to figure out what hitch-mounted accessories would work best. If you go from the ground to the top inside edge of the receiver tube opening, that's gonna be about 14 inches. So, if you plan on towing, chances are pretty good, you're gonna need to get a ball mount that has a slight rise in the shank. If you go from the center of the hitch pin hole to the edge of our rear bumper, that's gonna be right at about 2 1/2 inches. And we kinda talked about this earlier. But you can use that measurement to figure out exactly if any of those folding accessories that you might have can be stored in that upright position without hitting the back of your X1. But other than that, at the end of the day, kind of a good all around hitch. And actually, after seeing all the ones available, this one might be my favorite, you know. It is pretty versatile, in terms of what you could do with it, and it's gonna look really good too. Not only when the hitch is actually on, like we have it here, but obviously, there's no arguing that it looks good when it's off 'cause you can't even see it, right So, kind of a good, all-around hitch. As far as the installation goes, it wasn't too bad. You know, you might think, working on a BMW might be super complicated. That really wasn't the case. You do have to remove the fascia, but everything's pretty easy to get to. Nothing's really super complicated. It's just a little time consuming. So, set aside the better part of an afternoon, probably, to get this done. But as long as you stay focused, it really shouldn't give you any issues. If you'd like to stick around and watch how I put the hitch on, feel free to. We'll go ahead, pull them to the garage and do that together now. To begin our installation, we're gonna be here at the back of our BMW and we're gonna need to remove the fascia. That way, we can get our hitch on. So, the first thing we're gonna do is work here in the wheel well area on this back edge. So, if you look along this edge, we're gonna have two plastic rivets. And the easiest way to get these out is just to drill out the center. So, take a drill bit, just a hair bigger than the size of that hole. We'll drill it out, that one happen to just come out. But a lot of the times, it won't. We'll see what this one does. You see, like that one there, it's gonna come out. But you drill out the center and then you can take a flathead or a trim panel tool to actually pull that rivet out like that. And then down here, right below it, if you look right there and right there, we're gonna have two screws. And those are gonna be an eight-millimeter in size. And we'll pull those out. And I wanna mention, from this point on, anything that we do to this side of the vehicle, we're also gonna do to the other side 'cause it'll be set up the same way. But with that said, now we're gonna have this trim piece and we need to pop this off. So, you can just kinda pull up, push up as best as you can and pull out and that'll release some clips. And then right here, we're gonna have a Torx bit fastener. And that is a, I'm using a T15 to get that out. Let's go ahead and pull us out as well. Now, if you look on the bottom of our fascia, on each side, we're gonna have two more eight-millimeter screws. And on the bottom edge of the center of our fascia, kinda working our way over towards the passenger's side, we're gonna have a total of four eight-millimeter-head screws as well. So, now inside of our vehicle, you open up your hatch and we're gonna need to pull our taillights out. So, to give you a reference, we're over here on the passenger's side. What you're gonna do is remove this panel, it just pops out. And ours doesn't have it, yours might. Just over here on the passenger's side, you might have a green pull string deal here that opens up your fuel, your gas cap cover, if something goes wrong. Ours doesn't have it. But if yours does, you can just pop that out off the keeper here. And then we're gonna have three nuts holding our taillight in. So, these two at the bottom. There's gonna be one, way up top here. It's gonna be tricky to see in here, but we'll be able to see it once you pull the light out. But we'll get those removed using an eight-millimeter socket. With these two, what I like to do, 'cause you don't really wanna drop it, if you can take it off pretty much completely with your socket, and then you can kinda finish it by hand. That way, it doesn't fall down into the bottom there. Let me get this last one, way up top here. So, with those nuts loose, you can pull back on our taillight and we're gonna disconnect it. So, there's a connector there and there's a tab that you can push down on the center of it to separate it. So, there's kind of a better look. That's the tab you pushed down on. And here's the back of the taillight. That's where that third nut was, so it was way up top. So, just to give you a better visual. And we'll set this off to the side and do the same thing for the driver's side. So, now what we can do is get our fascia removed. I put some painters tape around here. That way, we don't scratch anything on accident. But you're gonna start at the corner and just start to peel this off, it actually comes off pretty easy, up until about this point. You may have to kinda lift up on that. And there's a couple of clips that you might just have to kinda manipulate a little bit to get it to come free. You might have to use a trim tool or a flathead screwdriver to kinda push it down. And then once you get to about this point, you wanna go over on the other side and get it to this area as well. So, I got this side done. And now, we'll just start to work it off and pull this away from the vehicle. In our case, you don't have any wiring. You may or may not have a wiring connector back here. If you do, just disconnect it. But with this free, we'll go ahead and set it off to the side. Now, we need to loosen up our exhaust a little bit. So, we're gonna have two isolator hangers. You can spray them down with soapy water or some type of lubricant. Take a pry bar, a big screwdriver or whatever you got, and you're gonna pry the rubber isolator off of the metal portion. These ones are kinda tough to get to, actually. They're super tight. That side worked off. And we're gonna have one over here as well. So, I'm kinda curious how I'm gonna do this. So, I have nothing really good to pry against, but we'll figure it out. Actually, this is working pretty good like this. So, that's all there is to that there. Now, we're able to get our actual bumper beam removed. So, we're gonna have three knots holding it on. Two up top and then one through there. So, you can use an 18-millimeter socket and an extension, and feed it through that hole. And that will allow us to get the nut off. We'll do the same deal up here for these two. And I already have the side, the other nuts off, from the driver's side. But we'll go ahead and just slide this off and set it to the side. So, now what we're gonna do is you can take your bumper beam and set it upside down. So, just like this. So, you know it's upside down because our single hole there, on this flange, is pointed up, 'cause that's the top of the beam, this is the bottom. So, have it just like this. And then we can take our hitch, all right And we're gonna flip it like this. Okay, 'cause if you think about it, this would be the outside of the car, so our receiver tube is like that. And you're gonna take it and put it into this opening. So, you might have to finagle it in there. So, we want to slide it roughly into position like so. So, if your receiver tube is already bolted to the actual hitch here, like ours was, we're gonna remove it. I think we're gonna have to have this removed anyway to kinda continue on. That's a 15/16 size bolt. So, we'll grab that and get this removed. So, it looks like, from seeing this, right, it looks like once we unbolt this, or take this bolt out rather, we should be able to slide our actual receiver tube up. So, I'll keep our hardware with it and just set this off to the side for now. So, what you can do now, if you look into the bottom of the hitch here, this opening, there's gonna be a square hole, right And you can take this carriage bolt and drop it down through, like that. Make sure it ends up sitting flat. And then I'm gonna try to keep all of this together, so we can actually see what's going on here still. But on the other side, where this bolt comes on out, you're gonna take one of these flat washers and put that up and a nut. And I'm gonna get this hand tight for now. And we're gonna torque this down, but I don't know if I have a socket this long, so I might have to find a different type of tool. I'll try the socket first. Probably, it'll not gonna work. So, I'll find a different tool that we can use. And once I do that, I'll show you what I come up with. So, we can come up with a few different options here in order to torque this. If you have a socket that deep, that'll fit, great. But chances are pretty good, you're probably not. But one of the things you can use is a deal like this. It's called a crow's foot. That'll allow you to clamp onto it or plug your wrench onto it and actually turn that. I'm gonna use this. I just feel like you have a better bite. I call it a dog bone. There's some other terms for it as well, but that's just what I use. So, you can use a 3/4-inch or a 19-millimeter, both will work just fine. And this will connect to the torque wrench. If you don't have a torque wrench, you can get one here at etrailer. Or a lot of the times, if you go to your local auto parts store, they'll have one there available to rent. But that'll allow us to get on there and make sure that's torque down. So, what I did was flip our assembly back upright, so now we have the two holes facing up. And I just took some tools here. I just kinda put them through this hole and through the hitch, just to kinda keep everything somewhat lined up. I think it might make it easier on us. But what you're gonna do after this is torqued, you gotta take a nut and essentially run this, probably all the way down or really close to the bottom. And then what we can do is take, what you're gonna do is take another flat washer. And you're gonna take this bracket here. This one has a bend in it. And these are gonna go underneath this portion of our bumper beam deal here, something like that. Actually, I'll adjust this nut a little bit to kinda help bring it up closer to the bumper beam, that portion. And then you're gonna take another flat washer and put that over. You're gonna take this plate and put that over. Another flat washer, a split lock washer, and finally, a nut. Now that we have this practically assembled, we're going to put it back on our car. Make sure everything's lined up. And I just wanna get at least one or two bolts, or nuts rather, started, on each side, hand tight. That way, everything will be supported. And once everything's supported itself, we'll come back and get the rest of them in and started as well. So, with the nuts all hand tight, we can tighten down this bolt. So, the nut underneath, you're gonna hold with a wrench. It kinda tight, kinda awkward positioning, but it can be done. And then this one, we're gonna tighten it down. So, once that's snug, then we can come back with a torque wrench and actually torque it, which we might do that in a minute, at the same time we torque everything else down. But with this one, it looks like you might be able to bend that and get a regular socket on it. If not, we can use some of those other tools that we talked about to get it completely torqued. At this point, we'll come back with our torque wrench and torque down all the nuts that's holding our bumper beam and our hitch onto the back of our vehicle. So, I went ahead and was able torque this one down. And I actually used the crow's foot for this one. So, I just was able to kinda get in there a little bit better. But like I said before, we could probably use other things. But other than that, that's all there is to it to actually getting the hitch on. So, from here, we can rehang our exhaust and put our fascia back together the opposite way that we removed it. So, once you get that exhaust rehung the opposite way, then we'll just grab our fascia and get this going as well. So, once your fascia is on and you get to the point where you need to reattach this trim piece, really the only difference, instead of the rivets, we're gonna use these plastic push pins. So, these just get pushed in and then you push on the head of it and that'll push it flat and keep our trim piece from coming off. And if you're planning on using your hitch right away, or sometime in the future, or you just wanna leave your receiver tube on there, you just slide it up and put that bolt back in and tighten it down. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the EcoHitch trailer hitch receiver on our 2014 BMW X1..