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

Video Transcript for Hopkins Plug-In Simple Vehicle Wiring Harness Installation - 2020 Acura MDX

Ryan: Hey everybody, Ryan here at eTrailer. Today on our 2020 Acura MDX we're going to be taking a look at, and showing you how to install, the Hopkins Plug-In Simple! Vehicle Wiring Harness.Since MDX's are really versatile SUVs many people use them to do a little bit of everything, so whether say you have a light up cargo carrier, or plan on doing some towing, you're going to want some trailer wiring. That way you can be safe and legal. And this kit is going to do just that. It's going to illuminate and provide your trailer with all those necessary functions, so other motorists know your intentions as you're going down the road.Now something pretty cool about this kit is the fact that it's going to be completely hidden whenever you're not using it, but it's going to be super easy to get to whenever you are ready to use it. And that's because it lives inside of our MDX.

So whenever we're ready we'll just open up our hatch, we'll lift up on our floor coverings, and we can pull our wiring out. It's as simple as that.So the way this is going to work is this is going to get draped over your threshold here. So you'll just rest it like this. Anywhere on the weatherstripping is fine, it's perfectly normal, it's not going to hurt the wiring or anything like that when we close the hatch on it. But I will say you want to do your best to avoid the latch here, you don't want to get it hung up in that.That being said we'll close our hatch.

And now we're ready to hook up to our trailer or our light up accessory. This kit does give us quite a bit of wire to work with, almost too much actually, but I'd rather have it and not need it than the other way around. So you can always put some of this extra wiring back inside and close the hatch.But with that being said this is a 4-pole connector, so really common. And even though it does come with, actually, a really nice cap, I would suggest putting some dielectric grease on the terminals from time to time to help go that extra mile to keep them protected. And it's pretty convenient, the kit actually comes with a small pouch of that.

So that should get you by for a while.Something nice about this kit is the fact that it uses a module box. And what that's going to do is protect your Acura's factory wiring if a short or an electrical issue we're to occur on the trailer side. And to me that's really important. These newer vehicles have really complicated electronic systems and you wouldn't want to do anything to jeopardize that. So because of that module box that's one less thing we're going to have to worry about.Now as far as the installation goes it really can't get much easier.

More or less all you have to do is lift up your floor coverings, plug in your harness to a connector, and install a couple of fuses. That's really all there is to it, so you shouldn't have any issues getting it done by yourself at home in the garage or even in the driveway. Speaking of which let's go ahead and do that together now.To begin our installation we're going to be here at the back of our Acura and we're going to need to locate our factory connector, so that'll be in the hatch. So we'll open that up and we're going to have to remove a few floor coverings or push them out of the way at least. Flip that one up, as well as this one. We can grab this little cargo container there and push that up out of the way as well. And on the driver's side we're going to have a little panel that's covering up our fuses. What we need to do is pop that off and our connector should be under there. So we can just get a small flat head and pry that open.So now we're able to grab our new trailer wiring and get it plugged in. The connector that we're going to be using is this one right here. So we'll just take our new trailer wiring, I'm going to run it behind the plastic there, that way it doesn't interfere with our fuse box cover. So we'll take that and simply just push it into place.Now we can grab our white wire with the pre-attached ring terminal and ground it to the body of our vehicle. Well it turns out, conveniently, there's a factory ground right here. So I'm going to pull off that bolt using a 10 millimeter, so we'll just run that out. And we can take that same bolt, push our ring terminal through it like that, and simply just re-secure it.Now what we can do is come to our fuse box here and install the included fuses. So we're going to be using this slot right here and we're going to put the 10 amp fuse in it. And we're also going to be using this slot right here and we're going to be putting in the 7.5 amp fuse there. So these are kind of small, sometimes it helps to take a pair of needle nose pliers and at least get it going that way. Not a ton of room to work, especially if you have larger hands, so these pliers really make it a lot easier.At this point it's a good idea to test your wiring and make sure that it's functioning properly. I'm using this little tester here and you can find it at eTrailer.com. We'll first try our left turn signal, our right turn signal, our brake lights, and our running lights.Now that we've verified our wiring works I went ahead and just used a couple of zip ties to secure our box here to this factory wire line, keep it from bouncing around. That's how ti turned out. And once we have that secure you can go ahead take our fuse cover, pop that back into place, and then just flip back down all of our floor coverings.Now our wiring does live inside the vehicle, so we can just bundle it up here and put our floor coverings back on top of it. However, if you prefer to route it outside of the vehicle to your hitch that's 100% acceptable. And to do that if you look right here there's kind of a little circle section here in this rubber mat, if you actually cut that out underneath it there should be a rubber grommet there, and you can use that rubber grommet to push your wiring to the bottom side of our Acura, and mount it outside. If that's how you want to do it. You just take our floor coverings and flip them back down into position.And that'll finish up our look at, and our installation of, the Hopkins Plug-In Simple! Vehicle Wiring Harness on our 2020 Acura MDX.