Hopkins Custom Tail Light Wiring Kit for Towed Vehicles

Video Transcript for Hopkins Tail Light Wiring Kit Installation - 2021 Jeep Gladiator

Hey everyone, Ryan here at Etrailer, today on our 2021 Jeep Gladiator, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install the Hopkins custom fit vehicle wiring kit for towed vehicles. Before we jump right in, I figured it'd be useful just to address one of the main questions a lot of people wonder when it comes to setting up a flat tow. And that's, what parts am I gonna need There's gonna be a total of five main components, and usually we like to be hooked up to the motor home and really give you a good visual of what's going on. We got some really bad weather today, so, kinda stuck inside, but, that in mind, you're gonna have your base plate. And that's going to give us an attachment point, that way we can hook our tow bar up to it. So a tow bar, connect the front of your Jeep to the back of your motor home.

Third main part'll be safety cables, and these are just gonna connect to the Jeep, to the back of your motor home's hitch. And in the event of an unlikely disconnect, we're gonna keep everything paired together. The fourth main part will be tow bar wiring. Again, connect to the back of the motor home and to the front of your Jeep, and that's gonna transfer the lighting functions. That way you're safe and legal.

And last but not least, the fifth main part will be a supplemental braking system. And what that'll do is hit the brakes in your Jeep whenever you hit the brakes in your RV, helping to bring you to a more complete and predictable stop. To effectively demonstrate how a kit is gonna work, I'm hooked up to a test box here, which is simulating a motor home, so, whatever signal that we turn on here, it should get sent to the back of our Jeep. I turned our left blinker on, and it's getting sent to the back of our Jeep. Sam's gonna hold true for the right turn.

The taillights as well as the brake lights. There are a lot of kits available for the Gladiator, and they're all gonna work pretty good. You're gonna have the types of kits that you actually splice diodes into it, like the Roadmaster, the Roadmaster smart diodes, you have a Blue Ox kit. And all those are really reliable, we do a ton of 'em, nothing wrong with them, but with the Hopkins, what kinda separates it is the fact that it's plug and play. So, big difference with this is it's definitely going to simplify the installation process.

I pulled our taillight out to show you how this kit is going to work, and it just uses T connectors. So you unplug the harness from your taillight, and the new harness plugs right into it, and so it really makes things simple when it comes to setting everything up, as opposed to, you know, taking the diodes, the diode-style kits, with those you have to actually splice into your factory wiring and plug 'em in. Which, like I said, work really well, and are pretty reliable, but it is a little bit of extra work, as far as that goes. And for those of you that might be wondering too, I know this is something that came to my mind. If you end up setting up your Jeep to pull a trailer around, whenever you're not flat towing and you need trailer wiring, a lot of the wiring kits are going to kinda work the same way, you know, they're just gonna tee in to the taillight wiring harness. And if that's something you plan on doing, those kits are going to work in conjunction with the wiring kit that we have here, you'd simply just kinda double it up, you know, you don't plug the trailer wiring in, and tee that in as well, so you can have both functioning properly, so, you know, it'd be set up correctly whenever you're flat towing, and then if you're pulling a trailer around with your Jeep, that trailer wiring will work as well. Something I wanna mention, the kit is going to have a four-way flat style end on it, similar to this here. And that part will be here at the front of the Jeep, and allow you to actually plug in to the back of your coach. With that said, you are gonna need that jumper wire, so there's a piece with two ends like this on it that would plug into the front, and then you can plug into the back of your motor home, so you can always grab that separately, but, with that in mind, it's a really popular upgrade and super common, and almost necessary in most cases to cut that four-way end off and upgrade to a six-way round style connector like we did here. And a big reason for that, is it's just a lot more common, you have a lot more options, in terms of what types of umbilical cables that you can use, a lotta the late model coaches are gonna have a seven-way style connector, electrical connector on the back of 'em. And, you know, it's just a lot more compatible with a lotta the different types of motor homes over the road, not to mention as well, sometimes you might have to do this, so for example, if you're wanting to use a battery charge line kit, that way you can trickle charge your Jeep's battery whenever you're flat's on it down the road. Those charge lines get hooked up to these six-ways. So, if you had that original four-way flat there, you wanna be able to use it. There's a ton of these available. We're using the Roadmaster one here today. But they're all gonna work out pretty much the same. Other than that, at the end of the day, you know, there's quite a few different diode wiring kits out there available for the Gladiator, and having experience with pretty much all of 'em, you know, they're all gonna work out well, keep your Jeep protected, and keep you safe and legal. As far as the installation goes, this one being plug and play, definitely a little more simple. It is time-consuming, though, just having to route wiring from the back of the Jeep all the way up here to the front, but, take your time, stay focused, and you should be in pretty good shape. That in mind, though, why don't we go ahead and get started on it now To start, the first thing that we're gonna need to do is remove our taillights, so ahead and drop the tailgate, and you're gonna have two eight-millimeter head screws. Go ahead and pull those out. Then what you wanna do is grab a taillight, pull it straight back towards you. And that will release it. And we'll go ahead and unplug it, it's kinda buried up here. So here's the connector, you're gonna have this red tab. Push back on that and then down on the center. And that'll release it. Go ahead and set our light off to the side. Do the same exact thing to get the passenger side when removed. We'll grab our wiring connector now, our new harness. And decide with the real short wiring here, it has yellow, blue, red, and brown. We're gonna take this, over on the driver's side, just run it from the bottom up into the taillight pocket. And then these are going to match up with our factory connectors. One of the T connectors is gonna line up with our factory connector there. You really can't mess this up, it only plugs in one way. We'll lock that down, and then, for this box here, I'm gonna go ahead and get this secured, and I'll show you what I came up with. Here's where I secured our box. We just had a bundle of factory wiring that ran straight down here, And it was pretty secured, actually, to the body of our vehicle, and so I just used a zip tie, ran it around the box, and zip tied it around that bundle of factory wiring. What we're able to do now, we can take our taillight connector, plug that in to the other end, lock the tab down, and simply just reinstall this the opposite way that we removed it. Underneath of our Jeep now. So this is the driver's side back corner, where we took that connector and pushed it up into the taillight pocket. This is where we went through. And so, for the rest of the wiring you need to route it. You'll have your other T connector, and this green, yellow, and brown wire, they go this way. The green, yellow, and brown wire, and it just comes up and over, and that'll get routed towards the front eventually. But the other one, the T connector, I pushed through the tube here in our trailer hitch. And just pushed it completely through it, over to the passenger side. This is where it comes out here. And just zip tie it up every now and again. And I took that T-connector, simply just pushed it right up into the passenger side taillight pocket. Over here on the passenger side, you know, our wire. I pushed it right up into the taillight pocket. And just like we done on the driver's side, plugged it right on in, same way, kinda zip tied up our loose wiring, the extra wiring. And that's really all there is shoot over here, so we'll go ahead and get our taillight reinstalled. Back underneath of our Jeep, over on the driver's side. We can get the yellow, green, and brown wire routed up towards the front. And whenever you're routing wiring, you always wanna do your best to avoid any hot or moving parts, so keep that in mind. But I took our wire and ran it kinda up along through here. Kinda tricky to see, but there's a factory piece of wire that runs along the frame that I just followed. It's a little difficult to see, but, it comes up through here up and over our spring. And way up through here, where it continues along this way. Here's a better look at the wiring, where I have it routed, along through here. And with a lot of our exhaust being right here, I decided to take the wire, push it over the top of our frame, where it's gonna run along the outside of the frame rail. So actually, you can see the wire pretty decent from the outside. But this is where it's going. And this is where I kinda ran it up and over the frame. Where it just follows along through here. And you just use your zip ties every now and again to keep it secure. And once it got to this point. The wire. Essentially it's pretty wide open, the wire, I kinda just jammed it up in the engine compartment, was able to go from up top, grab it, and pull it into place. Here's where a wire came up into the engine compartment. And if you're doing a supplemental braking system, which requires a tap in to this wiring, give yourself a little bit of working room here, that's what this big loop's for. I'm doing the Stay-IN-Play, made by Demco, just to give you an example, but, anyway, the wire just continues along, and drops down. And so that wire, you can actually see a little piece of it, in through here. But, you're just gonna route it down to the front where your mounting bracket is located, which ours happens to be right here. And we can start to get this hooked up. So at this point, now there's a couple things you could do, you could mount this up. And then this white wire coming outta the back, this is a ground. So you could take the self-tapping screw that they give ya and ground this to the frame somewhere. That's if you wanted to utilize the four-way style connector, which, in the majority of cases, people aren't gonna use this setup, most people are going to upgrade, which is what I would recommend too, to a six-way round, they're just a lot more versatile. You can use a battery charge line kit with this style connector and some other things, so, that's what we're gonna be doing. So, we'll just get rid of our four-way here. I'm just gonna cut that off. I'm gonna cut as much as I can off of the white wire. Because we might be able to use this for a ground, since this already has the ring terminal attached and everything. We'll find out in a minute. We're gonna take these three wires, and strip the insulation back. Give that wire a twist. And I'm just gonna do same thing to these other ends. We'll take the rubber dust cover now, and slide that over the bare end of the wires. And, we are gonna be able to use the white wire for ground here, so I cut it, you know, about in half, strip that in back too. So I'll feed that, through there as well. And then we can grab our connector and make our connections here, so, these are going to be labeled. Kinda tricky to see. But this is TM for taillight, so the brown wire goes there. We have GD for ground, so the white wire plugs into that. This one is LT for left turn. So the yellow wire goes there. And then RT for right turn. So the green wire plugs into that. So what we'll do, how this works, you have these little set screws. You can back these out almost all the way. So I have the TM, the taillight. Push our brown wire into the socket. Now you're holding it down in there, you can tighten up that set screw. Snug it up, and I'm just going to work my way around, until we get all of 'em plugged in. You got all of 'em hooked up, and here's how the back of the connector plug looks. And for the time being, I'm just gonna take the dust cover, put that over it. Once I verify everything works, I'll come back and apply silicone to all the terminals to keep it sealed up and prevent corrosion. And you know, then you can come back too and put this over and tape it up, but, I like to do that at the very end, make sure it works first, that way if there's an issue, we have to get back in here, you don't have a huge mess to deal with, so, just take this and loosely mount this up, for the time being. We have our white wire, and this is gonna have to get grounded, I'm just gonna go right to the bottom of our bumper beam. Got this self-tapping screw. What I like to do with this style of ring terminal, is actually start to drill the hole first. And then. I actually secure this. Now it's a good idea to test the wiring to make sure that it's working properly, so you can plug in your motor home when you're doing this, but, keep in mind, if your motor home has any issues, it might mislead ya into thinking it's something you did on the Jeep side, so, that's why I'm using this test box here, kt simulates the motor home, I know it works 100%. And I plugged our cable and it into the front of our Jeep, and we can run through all of our lighting functions. We'll turn on our taillights. We can try out our left turn signal. Our right turn signal. And our brake lights. Since we verified it works, I sealed everything up like we talked about earlier. And with that done, that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Hopkins custom fit vehicle wiring, on our 2021 Jeep Gladiator.