Curt Echo Mobile Trailer Brake Controller Installation - 2016 Acura MDX

Products Featured in this Video

Curt Echo Wireless Brake Controller - 7-Way Plug Mount w/ Bluetooth App - 1 to 2 Axle - Proportional

1318 reviews

Code: C51180

Retail: $419.95

Price:  $289.95

• Trailer Brake Controller
• Proportional Controller

• Hidden
• Up to 2 Axles
• Smartphone Display
• CURT

Bluetooth-enabled brake controller lets you monitor and control your towing directly from your phone. Create multiple trailer profiles and tweak your settings in the app. One step, plug-and-play installation into your 7-way.

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How to Install the Curt Echo Mobile Trailer Brake Controller on a 2016 Acura MDX

Today on our 2016 Acura MDX, we're going to take a look at the CURT Echo proportional brake controller. This is designed for one, up to two axles. The part number is C51180. The Echo being a proportional brake controller is going to be a lot safer than what we're used to with the old time delay brake controllers. Basically with the Echo, it's going to brake in proportion to how your vehicle's braking, so it has a sensor inside. If we slam on the brakes, we're going to get a lot of braking power back to our trailer very quickly.

If we just ease on the brakes in traffic or something like that, well, the trailer's also going to mimic that. So, we're never overworking or we don't have to worry about our trailer not doing enough work each time we hit the brakes. It's going to be really safe, really nice. It's going to engage properly.Now, the Echo is a very new design in brake controllers. Basically, we're able to plug this in between a working seven pole and our trailer, and we can control everything from our smartphone app.

As far as the installation process goes, as long as we've got our working seven pole, we're just going to stick the Echo right in. We want that door to come down. Now, there's going to be a tab on the door just like the one you can see here. We want to ensure that the tab is behind the one that sticks up on the controller itself. Once we've got that in place, we'll bring our seven pole.

That's going to plug in just like we'd plug in our trailer to our vehicle, just like that.Now, to operate the brake controller, we're just going to go to the Apple or Play Store and we're going to download the Echo Smart Control. At that point, we can open it up. It gives us the option of five different profiles, so whether you have five different trailers, five different drivers, or you want to set a single trailer up for different conditions, be very easy to do, and you can rename each of these. You can say heavy rain, heavy drive, light rain, light drive, however you want it, and just simply input it. So, you'll select the one you want.

It's going to come right up.We've got our gain adjustment here. That's max output. This, we can adjust up or down. And we have sensitivity adjustment. The max output's going to be the amount of power going to our brakes. The sensitivity is going to be how quickly those brakes are applied. Also, the large round button, this is going to act as our our manual override. Generally it's a lever on most brake controllers. In this case, we just hit that center button in the event we have a sway situation, we need to get our trailer under control. Very easy to hit that and apply just the brakes on the trailer.Now, depending on the light conditions outside, we can change the theme from a white background to a darker background, just depending on your driving situation and how you want that to be set. Now, we've talked about the manual override lever, and that's just kind of a way that we can test it and make sure it's working properly. We'll want to spin our tire, then hit our smart button. You see, that's going to engage those force until we release. Just like that.Now, you'll have a quick reference guide. It's going to show you quick setup, it's going to show you how to adjust profile settings and name them, and it also gives us our troubleshooting guide here. Now, the brake controller itself has an LED on it located right underneath the lid. You can see the LED right here is going to flash different colors or it's going to indicate to you what's going on with the controller. So, if you have any issues with it, you can use this and troubleshoot.Now, a few requirements your MDX is going to have will be that you need a working four pole trailer connector to start with, then you're going to add part number ETBC7L, which is basically just your seven pole connector here on the back, and the wire and breaker to run up to your battery to deliver that 12 volt power out of the rear. Those are really the only requirements. If your Acura did not come with a four pole trailer connector, you can look on our fit guide and pick one up there. Campaign easy to get installed here. Run it down, add that ETBC7L, and we're able to plug this directly in, plug in our trailer, and we've made no major modifications to our vehicle at all. We haven't got into the vehicle's wiring at all, and we have a working brake controller. And that's going to complete our look at the CURT Echo on our 2016 Acura MDX.