etrailer | Curt Powered Tail Light Converter Installation - 2021 BMW X1

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-install-c...
Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2021 BMW X1, we're going to be showing you how to install the Curt trailer wiring harness with a four-way flat connector. But before we do that, let's check it out and make sure this is something that you're going to need. So we get a lot of people using these Bimmers to do a little bit of everything, you know, and that does include pulling some trailers around. Well, whenever you are pulling a trailer, you're gonna want the lights to work. That way, people around you know what's going on.

It'll just keep you a little more safe and not to mention legal as well. And that's exactly where this wiring kit is going to come into play. It's going to provide us with the connector that we need. That way we can hook up our trailer and have all the lights work. With the wiring kit being a four-way flat type connector, that's a really common type.

It's going to work with a lot of your smaller type trailers like utility trailers and things of that nature. What's pretty popular nowadays too is lights on accessories, like a lot of cargo carriers, for example, it has some lights on it. Chances are pretty good those all use this type connector, so you'll be able to power those up as well. Has a dust cover that's included to help keep it protected. And one thing about this setup, it uses what's called a converter box, and it uses its own individual power wire too.

So it gets power from your vehicle's battery. And so what that's going to do is help keep your vehicle protected. If there's an issue or anything like that, you're not going to have to worry about it frying your BMW's electrical system. But other than that, at the end of the day, a wiring kit that's going to get the job done. I will say with this being more or less kind of a universal type wiring kit, you are going to have to splice into your wires.

But believe it or not, that's the easy part. There's really no challenge there associated with it. The hardest part about the installation is actually running the power wire from the back to the front. It just takes a little bit of time. So definitely, you know, set aside the better part of an afternoon to get this done. I do want to mention something as well. With these imported cars, be real careful. If there's a custom fit kit available, make sure to compare their type of connectors. So a lot of those custom kits will plug into the back of your taillights. Just take a quick peek at 'em and make sure those connectors match up. Because sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And so this is where a kit like this comes into play, allows you to hook up to any vehicle, more or less. But with all that said, why don't we go ahead and start getting this installed now. To begin our installation, we're going to be here at the back of our BMW. What we need to do is remove our taillights. So we'll start by opening up our rear hatch. And then if we come here to this area, we're gonna have this plastic cover deal. And right there, there's gonna be a fastener. Can just very lightly unscrew this. It'll probably want to stop. And if it does, you can just grab it and kind of pry it out. It's almost like a hybrid screw in, press in type fastener. So that out of the way, you pull out on this, and then lift up. Then to get the light out, we're going to have two 10 millimeter nuts. Pull those out. We'll grab our tail light, pull straight back. And we'll disconnect them for now. So pull up on that red tab, push down on the connector, and that'll separate it. So repeat the same process to get the other one removed. At this point, I went ahead and tested our wiring. So connector here, some electrical tape, can just peel that back, and we're going to have three wires. A brown one, a black and yellow one, and a gray and purple one. And so what I did, I just very carefully peeled a little bit of the installation back. And what we're looking for is our taillight signal, our stoplight signal, and our turn signal. And so what I did is I just used a test light. And you ground it out, and you put it on each one of the wires. So now I have my taillight signal on. So you can see when I touch this bare metal here, you could see my lights going on. So I'll go ahead and turn my lights off. And now I shouldn't have a signal there anymore. So I turned them off, and don't have any signal. So we know that's the taillight circuit. If you need a test light, you can grab one here at etrailer. And I did that for everything. So, and what I came up with is this gray wire with the purple stripe. That's our taillight signal. And it turns out that we have a t