Hopkins Plug-In Simple Vehicle Wiring Harness with 4-Pole Flat Trailer Connector

Video Transcript for Trailer Wiring Harness Installation - 2016 GMC Terrain HM11141275

Today, on our 2016 GMC Terrain, we'll be having a look at the Hopkins Plug-In Simple Vehicle Wiring Harness with 4-pole flat trailer connector, part number HM11141275. Here's what it looks like when it's all hooked up. Really easy to hook up to once we're ready to hook up to a trailer. Once we've arrived at our destination and we've unhooked our trailer, when we want to store this, little trick here. You can take your dust cover, slide it around your safety chain loop here, and then secure the dust cover back over the wiring. This will help keep your wiring from hanging down and getting snagged on something.

Also, it will keep it readily available for when you need to use it again. Now, the reason you want this 4-pole electrical connector is so you can have all the wiring that's required by law, so you can safely tow a trailer. Here's what our wiring harness comes with. As you can see, it's a very simple wiring harness. We have 2 connectors right here, which will go to our taillights. Green will go to the passenger's side, left will go to the driver's side.

Branches off of that, we have our 4-pole flat connector here to hook up to our trailer, and then we have a ground wire here, which we can attach to the vehicle's body using the provided self-tapping screw. We have 2 zip-ties here to secure our wiring up underneath the vehicle. I do like the fact it comes with some terminal grease that we can put in our connections for our taillights to help any corrosion or moisture from affecting it. Finally, we have a nice little dust cap here, which slides over our 4-pole flat trailer connector. We'll go ahead and put that on here now.

Slide it on over, like a rubber band. It goes in this groove here, and folds back. That will protect our trailer wiring when it's not in use. I'll begin our installation by opening our hatch. Start on our driver's side. We'll remove our taillight assembly.

Take out these covers over our screws that hold it in place. Just pop these covers on out. We'll find some 10-millimeter screws behind there. Remove our 10-millimeter screws, and we'll grab our taillight assembly and pull it on out towards us. Find this tab here on our taillight, push in on it, pull off, and we can set the taillight aside. We'll repeat the same process on the other side. We'll be working with the yellow wire. Check your side. This is for our left turn signal, since we're working on the left side of the vehicle. Set that aside for right now. Grab our green wire, and we'll drop it down behind our bumper cover here. It'll come out the bottom of our vehicle. Do the same with our 4-pole flat trailer connector and the ground wire. The reason we're doing this is so we can hide all of our wiring behind the bumper cover and bring it up to the other side here later. Now, we'll take some of our electrical contact grease here, and we'll place it on our vehicle side connector. Smear it on in there a little bit. You see this is the female side. Grab our male side of our new tow harness connector, and plug it in. Once you hear it click, you're good. Take some more of our contact grease, and put it on the new end right here. Now, we can take our taillight assembly, and we'll plug it back in. That clicked, so we're good. Make sure all of our wires are tucked up nice, and neat, and out of the way. Put our taillight back into the guide pin holes. Back in the holes, just push it in. If you're having difficulty getting the taillight back in, make sure this weather stripping that goes along the outside edge of this rear window sits on top of the taillight assembly. Once it's on top, the taillight slides in real easy. Reinstall our screws now. Place our covers back on. We'll go on to the other side now. Now, we'll take something to use as a pull wire. You can use a coat hanger, something that's somewhat rigid, but yet somewhat flexible. Feed it down our taillight opening. We'll grab our wires, specifically the passenger's side connection point over here, route it along underneath our bumper cover, and attach it to our pull wire on the passenger's side, and pull it on up. Our bumper has these tabs right here to hold it up in place. Once you have it routed behind all those, we'll go up and over our exhaust pipe here. Now, we'll attach our pull wire to our electrical connections, and we'll pull the wire up. When we pull it up behind behind our taillight, it's going to pull it away from our exhaust, so we'll be fine. Just using some electrical tape here. You don't have to use electrical tape. You could use a zip-tie, or something of that nature, to attach it. You just want to make sure it's going to stay attached long enough to pull it on up. Now, we'll take our pull wire, pull it on up, and our connectors have appeared. Take off the tape, grab our factory terminal here, and, again, apply some terminal grease on it. Smear it on in there. Grab the male end; plug it in till it clicks. Take our new connector from the tow harness; put some grease on it. Plug it in till it clicks, just like so. Now, we'll slide our taillight back into position, making sure our guide pins, here and here, go into our 2 holes and the edge of our taillight is underneath this weather strip thing. Just like that. Reinstall our 2 screws again. Put back our caps. Now, we can close our hatch. We're done in here. We'll complete tidying up our wiring underneath the vehicle. Now, we'll take our white ground wire here. We have all of our wires behind our hitch at this point. Take our self-tapping screw, place it over the ring terminal, and go up into the chassis right here in the bumper support. All right, we've got our self-tapping screw in for our ground. I put a couple zip-ties up on our hitch to secure our wiring up. That way, we have just enough wiring hanging down here to make our connection to our trailer. With that all done, we can test our wiring now. We have our tester plugged in now. If you'd like to purchase one of these, we have them available on our website. It's part number I26. Go ahead and start up our headlights. Verify that's working. Left turn signal's working. Right turn signal's working. Our brake lights our working. With all of our lights working, we're ready to hook up to our trailer and go out on down the road. That completes our look at the Hopkins Plug-In Simple Vehicle Wiring Harness with 4-pole flat trailer connector, part number HM11141275, on our 2016 GMC Terrain.