Curt Trailer Hitch Installation - 2020 Toyota RAV4

Products Featured in this Video

Curt Trailer Hitch Receiver - Custom Fit - Class III - 2"

1320 reviews

Code: C13416

Retail: $309.95

Price:  $190.43

• Trailer Hitch
• Custom Fit Hitch
• Class III
• 600 lbs TW
• 4000 lbs GTW

• 2 Inch Hitch
• Concealed Cross Tube
• CURT

This fully welded trailer hitch receiver bolts onto your vehicle's frame with no welding required. Powder coated steel is sturdy and corrosion resistant.

Do you have a question about part C13416?more information >     

How to Install the Curt Trailer Hitch on a 2020 Toyota RAV4

Conner: Hey guys, how's it going Connor here today at etrailer.com. We're going to be taking a look at the CURT class 3 trailer hitch here for our 2020 Toyota Rav4. So our CURT class 3 hitch is going to be an excellent option here for our Rav4, we have the larger two inch receiver tube opening, which is going to allow us to tow trailers and we're also going to have a much greater variety of hitch mounted accessories like bike racks and cargo carriers to choose from. So our CURT hitch here has a class 3 rating, which is going to provide us with a 4,000 pound gross trailer weight rating. And that's going to be how much we can pull outward on our fully loaded trailer. We're also going to have a 600 pound tongue weight rating, which is going to be the downward vertical force on our receiver tube opening.Now keep in mind we do need to check the vehicle's owners manual and abide by the lowest rating component.

So what I really like about our CURT trailer hitch here, so you can see we having nice dull powder coated finish, which is going to help it blend in with the vehicle. We're also going to have this very sleek collar on our receiver tube opening, which is going to give us a really nice finished look. Now our CURT trailer hitch here has a concealed design and what this essentially means is we're not going to have a bulky cross tube sitting below our bumper that we have to look at. The cross tube is going to be tucked right up behind our factory bumper. So we're going to have an extremely clean install look almost factory like.

The only portion we are going to see is the required receiver tube opening here.So furthermore with our concealed cross tube it's going to allow us to have our receiver tube opening directly under the bumper here. So we're going to get the best ground clearance as well. So on the side of our CURT trailer hitch here, we're going to have a five eighths inch diameter hitch pin hole, which is going to be used so we can secure our ball mount and hitch mount accessories with the hitch pin and clip. However, keep in mind these are not included with our trailer hitch. We do need to purchase these separately.

You can get them with your hitch here through etrailer. On the bottom of our receiver tube here, we also have our welded safety chain loops. We're easily going to be able to use the smaller S type hooks as well as our larger clevis hooks. We're going to have plenty of room for our hooks to move around within the safety chain loops without interfering with our hitch pin and clip.Now we're going to take a couple measurements here. They're going to help you when you're selecting your hitch mount accessories such as a ball mount, bike rack, or a cargo carrier.

The first measurement we're going to take us from the ground to the top inside edge of our receiver tube opening. That's going to be about 11 and three quarter inches, and this is going to be useful when we're selecting our ball mount. The other measurement we have for you here is going to be the distance from the center of the hitch pin hole out to the outside edge of our bumper, and that's going to be about three and a half inches. And that particular measurement is going to be useful when we're selecting our folding accessories such as a bike rack or cargo carrier so we can make sure it doesn't come into contact with the vehicle.So now that we've gone over some of the benefits and features of our CURT trailer hitch, let's jump right into installation and show you how easy this is to install it yourself. So the first step of our installation here, we need to go ahead and lower our exhaust, but before we do that, we need to support it. So when we do break the hangers loose, it doesn't fall down. So we're just going to be taking a ratchet strap here. If your vehicle is on the ground, you could just use some blocks of woods and Jack stands, whatever you have.We're simply just going to find two connection points. These spring cups here seemed to be pretty good. We're just going to tighten our strap here and as you can see when our exhaust comes down, we're going to have a little bit of a support here with our strap. So before we lower the exhaust, what we're going to do is just to help us with installation, we're going to get some penetrating oil here or we're going to spray down all of our rubber isolators, which is going to help the hanger come out of there easier. So now we're going to come to the rear most isolator here, which is going to be directly in the center of the vehicle. Now we have two options to remove this. There's actually a tool specifically for this called an exhaust hanger removal tool, but chances are you're not going to have one of those at home. So we're going to show you how to do this with just a pry bar.So now we have two more exhaust isolators we need to remove on the rear of the vehicle here. However, we have a couple of different options for this. We can use the pry bar method like we used for the one up here. Or we can take a 12 millimeter socket and we can unbolt the hanger from the bottom of the frame, which is what we're going to do. So now that we have the exhaust lowered, we have two well nuts that are going to be on the outside of our driver and passenger frame we need to access. So we're going to come up in the wheel well here. We can see these little black stickers that are over our weld nuts. So we actually need to remove both of those black stickers on either side. So what we're going to do is, we're just going to take a putty knife. We're just going to do as best we can to try to peel that sticker back. Just like that.So now that we have one of the stickers off, we can go ahead and repeat this process for our other three holes. So now that we have the stickers removed, exposing our weld nuts here, we're going to take some lubricant, just some spray lubricant. We're going to try to soak those nice and good, and then we're going to take a nylon brush and try to clean out those weld nuts so we don't have any issues when we're threading our bolts.We need to do that on the other side as well. So now we can go ahead and set our hitch up into position on the vehicle. Making sure we come over the muffler. We just want to get a couple of threads started to hold it in place. So now with our hitch up into position we can go ahead and snug down our hardware using our 19 millimeter socket.So now with all our hardware snug we can come back with our torque wrench here and torque everything down to the specifications in our instructions.You need to repeat this process on all our other hardware as well. So on the passenger side of our vehicle here, our forward most bolt hole closest to the cab. We're going to have a little bit of a hard time getting our socket and torque wrench up into the space we have available, which is why we're going to need this special tool here called a crows foot adapter, a 19 millimeter crows foot adapter in particular. And this is going to allow us to torque a bolt down without much space to fit our torque wrench up there. So now that we have all of our fasteners torqued down, we can go ahead and take our exhaust and raise it back up into position. Now that we've got all of our hardware secure, we have everything back up into position that's going to do it today for the look and installation at our CURT class 3 trailer hitch, here for our 2020 Toyota Rav4.