etrailer | Curt T-Connector Vehicle Wiring Harness Installation - 2018 Kia Sportage

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Hey guys, Connor here at etrailer.com. Today, we're going to be taking a look at the Curt T-connector vehicle wiring harness for our 2018 Kia Sportage. So our Curt T-connector vehicle wiring harness is going to provide our basic trailer lighting functions so we can tow a trailer or if we have a cargo carrier with lights on it, it's going to work for those as well. So this is actually going to have a four way. There's going to be four pins here. One of them is going to be for our ground.
One of them is going to be for our taillights and the other two are going to be the left and right stop and turn signals. Now, this is the most basic trailer lighting functions that we're going to need. Some of the heavier trailers would have a seven way, which should have a break circuit as well as a battery charge circuit.But the towing capacity of this vehicle isn't really suited for some of those larger trailers, which is what makes this 4-pole a perfect option. So our Curt T-connector wiring harness is going to install inside the vehicle here, which basically means we're going to have it tucked away when we don't need to use it. So we don't have it sitting outside the vehicle and it has any chance to get any corrosion or dirt water in the terminals, which would cause issues.
However, there is an option to run that to the outside of the vehicle. It really just depends on how much we're going to be towing. If we're not going to be towing that often, then it's going to be perfect to route it inside the vehicle. However, if we find ourselves to be towing frequently, that's when we can install it on the outside of the vehicle, running it through the grommet we use for our other wires.Now, when we're ready to use our trailer wiring harness, all we need to do is simply route it out through the hatch here and just let it hang over the vehicle like so. The only thing we need to make note of is our latch mechanism right here.
We do want to steer clear of that, but essentially when you're ready to tow and hook up our trailer, you can just get however much wire lead we think we're going to need. Close it like so. Then we can go ahead and close our hatch. You see, we have wires coming out the bottom of the hatch here. We don't have to worry about the actual hatch pinching them.
There's a weatherstripping there that it fits through and it's nice and loose and you don't have to worry about it pinching any of the wires. And then we have our 4-pole trailer connector down here that we could just plug into our trailer when we're ready to use it.So in regards to installation, this is definitely going to be something that you can do yourself. We don't need any special tools. It is just going to take some time. The only thing that's going to be taking a little bit more time than the other is routing our power wire up to the vehicle's battery. However, again, this isn't hard, this isn't challenging per se. It's just going to take some time. The rest of the process involves removing our taillights, a few of the trim panels, all stuff that's pretty basic and easy to do with just some common tools. Keep in mind our Curt T-connector vehicle wiring harness is completely plug and play. So aside from running the power wire to the battery, everything's going to be plug and play so we don't have to make any modifications to our vehicle. We can always remove it down the line if we needed to, or we are going to sell our vehicle.So now that we've gone over some of the benefits and features, let's show you how easy this is to install yourself. So the first step for installation here, we're going to want to pop our hood. We're going to need to come in here and disconnect the negative battery cable on our battery here. So this is going to ensure we don't have any short circuits when we're installing our wiring harness. So again, to do this, we're going to need a 10 millimeter socket. We're just going to loosen this nut on top. So again, we shouldn't have to take this nut all the way off. We just need to loosen it. We can sort of wiggle our cable here, set it to its side, so it doesn't make contact with the terminal. So the next step of our installation here is to remove this little plastic trim panel behind our rear wheels here.In order to remove this, we're going to have three push fasteners, one here, one here, and then one on the backside of the fender here. Now, in order to remove these, we can just take a flatbed screwdriver, sort of pry the center section out. It should come out fairly easy, just like so, and again, we have one on the backside of the tire, just kind of hard to show you, but it s