EcoHitch Stealth Trailer Hitch Receiver - Custom Fit - 2"

Video Transcript for How to Install the EcoHitch Stealth Trailer Hitch - 2022 Kia Seltos

Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today we have a 2022 Kia Seltos and we're gonna be taking a look at, and I'm gonna show you how to install, the Torklift EcoHitch two inch Hitch Receiver. Adding a two inch hitch receiver to the back of your Kia Seltos is gonna allow you to do a couple of different things. You can haul bike racks and cargo carriers in order to get a little bit more space in your vehicle. This vehicle is actually my wife's car and we added this hitch on here so that we could put a cargo carrier on the back so we can go on longer trips with more stuff. If you want to pull a small trailer with this, which I plan on doing in the future, I'm gonna have to add 4-pole wiring in order to power the lights on my trailer.

Now what's gonna set this hitch apart from the other hitches available on our website for the Kia Seltos at this current time is that the hitch receiver tube is gonna be removable, so the rest of the hitch, all the framework of it's gonna stay on the frame of your vehicle, but you can take one singular bolt out and then this part of the hitch will pop right out. The only issue that I see with it, and personally why I'll probably just go ahead and leave mine in, is because it's very difficult to get a torque wrench under there in order to do that and it's got a pretty high torque rating to torque that bolt down so that your hitch receiver tube doesn't go anywhere. This hitch receiver tube, it's gonna feature your standard five eighths inch hitch pin hole. The hitch does not come with a pin and clip but you can find 'em on our website, locking and non-locking. (pin clinks) The safety chain loops, because this hitch is designed to be aesthetically pleasing when you're not using it.

You can take this off. The safety chain loops are hidden up here behind the bumper. They're gonna be back here. That's where our safety chain loop is there. I'll show you with our S-hook, (hook jingles) you can loop it around.

The only thing I see an issue with that is you may have to buy some extensions, because you can see here, we've got about a 16 inch long safety chain loop or safety chain and it's not even to where our trailer would be. We've got that S-hook that fit great on there. I've got a clevis style, we'll see if that fits. Yep, that fits great too. I really like the design of these because your safety chain loop is gonna be shaped this way.

So just something to think about in the future if you decide to pull a trailer with this, you're gonna have to, chances are make your safety chains a little bit longer. As far as weight capacities go for this hitch receiver, you're gonna get a max tongue weight capacity of 525 pounds. That's the downward pressure on the inside of the receiver tube. so you can think of, when you're pulling trailers, that's the tongue weight of the trailer, pushing down on the ball. And then any accessories like a bike rack or a cargo carrier free hanging off the back, you can't go over that 525 pounds. For the max gross trailer weight rating, you're gonna have a max capacity of 3,500 pounds. That is the trailer plus the load that you have in or on top of it. Now we're gonna give you some measurements so you know how it's gonna fit on your Kia. From the ground to the top inside of the receiver tube, you got about 12 and a quarter inches. That should be high enough off the ground where you don't have to worry about anything dragging. I will recommend getting a cargo carrier or a bike rack that has at least a rise, a two inch rise in the shank. And it'll give you a little bit more room by the time you get out here. From the ground to the bottom of the receiver tube is about nine and three quarters, so just be careful going in and out of steep inclines like driveways or entering a parking lot or something like that. A way that you can help to, if you do have a extremely steep driveway is to kind of approach it at an angle and it won't be so drastic. From the center of our hitch pin hole to the outermost part of our bumper, it's gonna be about five inches. You wanna keep that in mind when looking into accessories that fold up to the back of your vehicle or accessories that just have close components. If you have a cargo carrier that has a short shank on it, you wanna keep that in mind. You can compare those measurements to that on our website. We'll have all those measurements on there so that you know that accessory's gonna fit on here. When you compare it to that five inch mark to the closest part of the accessory, you'll know whether or not it's gonna fit before you even have to make a decision. My overall thoughts about this hitch is I really like it. I like the finish that Torklift puts on their hitches, it lasts for a very long time. Typically their hitches are a little bit more difficult to install but that's because you're not gonna see any part of the hitch receiver whenever you're using it. And you also have the option to remove it. So to me, the install process of it being a little bit more difficult is worthwhile because you only have to install it one time. I will say that and I'll show you in the install and explain a little bit more, there is one bolt on the passenger side. If you have this recovery point for pulling your car out of a ditch or something, you will have to be very, very patient to get that bolt into place 'cause it took us a couple hours to get that bolt lined up and to pull out of the hole, once we got the hitch up into place. But with that being said, let's go ahead and show you how to do the installation. To begin our installation we're gonna need to lower our exhaust a little bit and what I'm gonna do is I'll take a cam buckle strap, I'm gonna put it around each of these struts here on the back, just to support this center part here. Our exhaust hangers are gonna be up in these regions. You can see this one over here real easily. We're gonna have to spray this with a little bit of lubricant in order to get this to slide off of here. That'll allow us to have a little bit more room to work on our passenger side. Now we're just gonna take some soapy water, spray that on our hanger. (water squirts) This is just gonna help to lubricate it a little bit so that we can hopefully pull it off pretty easily. If you take a pair of channel locks you can get on either side. You want part of the channel locks to be on the rubber hanger and the other to be on the pin on the end, and just work this rubber isolator off. (tool clicks) (tool clicks) When you're removing these exhaust hangers, I struggled a little bit with both of 'em actually. An exhaust hanger removal tool is the specialty tool designed to remove these. If you know somebody who has one of these and you can borrow it, it's really gonna help out here. Now we'll just take our cam buckle strap and we'll lower it a little bit. I'm not gonna lower it too much 'cause I don't wanna put too much strain on this hanger right up here. If we end up having to lower this one too, we can do that but I'd rather not if I don't have to. Next on our passenger side, we're gonna have this little panel that we'll have to take off. This will not be going back on because the hitch has to go right where it's at. So we'll just pop these push pin fasteners out. The way that works is you pop the center out and then it will release the base. Looks like we had two there and then up here it looks like we got a 10 millimeter nut. (tool bursts) Now what we need to do is we'll take our fish wires. We're gonna start with the seven sixteenths fish wire. It's one of the smaller ones that comes in your kit. We have four half inch fish wires and two seven sixteenths. We'll take this, we're gonna take the coiled end of it. There's gonna be three holes on the side of our frame rail, One, two, three, the one closest to the back, we're going to feed our fish wire through and then up here on the frame, there's gonna be a little rubber grommet right here that we need to pop out. We'll pop that out. We're gonna hold onto it because we're gonna need to eventually put it back in place. We'll take our fish wire, we're gonna run it back there and I just got my finger up through that hole, reaching for the fish wire. Once you feel the end of it, keep pushing it and kinda guide it down through that hole. Now because we're gonna have to run our hardware up through that access hole, it's obviously gonna have to be big enough to fit the hardware up through it. If you hold your hardware up to this hole, you'll find out that these plates do not fit inside that hole. Just barely, but they still don't fit. So what we need to do is take a die grinder bit. I'm just gonna grind out a little section on one side, just enough for these spacer blocks to pass through. You can see we've got a tiny little chunk, just grind it out there. Just double check our spacer block, it fit's up in there now. so we can start getting our hardware run through there. We'll take a seven sixteenth bolt, we're gonna take one of these flat star washers, put it on there, and then that spacer block. What we could do is we'll take that coiled end, we're gonna thread this little assembly on there and we can pull it up through that hole. Easiest way to do this is slide that spacer block up in there first, and get it going, (bolt rattles) and then we'll take the bolt, and it'll shortly follow. Now we can grab the other end of our fish wire, pull it down to the end to where we have it out, sticking out right here. And the all we're gonna do is just barely push it back inside the frame rail so our hitch can slide up past it. I'm gonna repeat that process with the other two holes. Same combination of hardware, except we're gonna be using half inch bolts for the further forward two. (bolt rattles) Now over on our passenger side, one thing that I ran into which it doesn't say anything about this in the instructions and I couldn't find any info on it anywhere, is that this little recovery point, this is a little plastic knockout where you pump this out and then there's a little tow loop that you screw into that little silver portion there, sticking out of the frame. That is, so if you ever get an accident or something and they need to pull you out of a ditch, that's a pull point. Well the problem is is that pull point goes on the inside of the frame rail. It makes it really difficult to get the furthest rear bolt to stick out of the side of the frame. I worked on it for about an hour, just trying to get it to pull out. I figured out how you get it outta there, is you gotta get the spacer block to come up against the inside of the frame rail first. And then this bolt, (bolt rattles) you'll see the angle that I've got it at. It's like a 45 degree angle up. It's the only way it's gonna fit out of that hole. So what we're gonna do, until we get our hitch raised up, I'm gonna set it very gently right at the edge of that hole. That way when we raise the hitch up, we can just yank that bolt right there. Now with an extra set of hands, we're gonna take our hitch receiver and we're going to take the bolts, the fish wires, and slide 'em through from the inside out through the holes that correspond with the holes in our frame rail. Slide those out. That's gonna help us to line up the bolts with the hitch. (parts rattle) Pull down on our fascia a little bit here and get it above that. (parts rattle) There we go. Now this is such a tight fit between the frame rails that sometimes the fish wires are getting caught in between the frame rails, it can make it a little bit more difficult to get the bolts pulled out. So once you get the fish wires straightened back out from underneath the hitch, you should have no problem pulling it through the hole. (bolt rattles) (bolt clangs) Now we we inchesre having a little difficulty with that bolt again, that rear one, and that is because this happened. I pulled the bolt back out and our little star washer got hooked onto our fish wire and was not letting our bolt through. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna line this back up and what I recommend doing, for you guys starting out, is tape this star washer to the head of this bolt so it does not move. That way, hopefully, when we pull this back up in there, it'll pop right out of our hitch hole. Now once you get your three bolts run on the driver's side, you're gonna repeat that process on the passenger side. The passenger side is definitely, it's extremely difficult to get the rearmost bolt into place and that is because on our passenger side we're gonna have that mounting point for our tow loop, to be able to be towed away. We're gonna have that in the way. So pulling that bolt out is very, very difficult. So what we ended up doing is we just opened up one of these holes here on the bottom, just a little bit, so that we could get a tool up in there to help line the bolts up to get it pulled out. And then we followed it up with putting that same combination of hardware on each of our bolts. Now we're gonna take a 19 millimeter socket, we're gonna snug up the four bolts on our, for our half inch bolts and then we'll have to grab a different socket in order to do the seven sixteenths. (socket buzzes) (socket buzzes) The socket size for the other two nuts is gonna be a eleven sixteenths. (socket buzzes) Now we're gonna grab a torque wrench and torque all of our hardware to the specifications in the instructions. (torque wrench beeps) Now your instructions are gonna say do not put this vacuum into place but you can trim it to get it to fit. We cut this big notch out here and since this is my personal vehicle, I really just don't want to leave it off 'cause I'm just gonna end up throwing it away anyway, so if I can use it, I just ended up cutting that little notch out and I'm gonna put the fasteners back up into place. (part pops) (tool bursts) Now with our hitch all secured, our plastic panel back in place, we can put our exhaust hangers back and then we can get ready to put our hitch receiver tube in. (cam strap clicks) Now we'll take the large bolt that comes in our kit, we'll put the lock washer on, then the flat washer then we'll take our hitch. It's a good idea to just thread it in a few times, to make sure that the threads are clear. We've seen slag weld or paint in some of these before. Just weld nuts in general, not necessarily these hitches, but you can have issues so, you don't want to get it up here and then figure out you've got a problem. So lift this up into place. (hitch clatters) Slide our bolt in and then get it threaded in. We're gonna tighten this down and then torque it to the specs in the installation instructions. Well guys, that's gonna do it for the installation. Hopefully this video helped you decide whether or not the Torklift two inch Hitch Receiver's right for you in your 2022 Kia Seltos.