Curt Trailer Hitch Installation - 2021 Kia Telluride
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How to Install the Curt Trailer Hitch on a 2021 Kia Telluride
Clayton: Hello everybody, Clayton here at eTrailer.com. Here at eTrailer.com we install, test, and review a lot of different products to help you, as the customer, make a more educated decision before your purchase. Today we're going to be working on a 2021 Kia Telluride and we're going to be taking a look at, and showing you how to install, Curt's Class III Trailer Hitch Receiver.There might be a few different reasons that you're looking at putting a hitch receiver on your Telluride and one of those is going to be to, obviously, pull a trailer. But maybe you want to get some cargo out of the back of your Telluride and you want to use a cargo carrier or you want to take your bikes out for a trail ride and it's a lot easier to put them on a bike rack than it is to try to put them on the roof or disassemble them and keep them in the back.It looks really sharp on the back of our Telluride. We're not able to see any of our cross tube. The only thing visible is going to be our actual receiver, so it looks really sharp.
It almost looks factory.Our hitch is going to be a steel construction, so it's going to hold up really well for a long time. It also has a nice high gloss black powder coat finish, so that's just going to help resist rust and corrosion as well, and just going to keep it looking nice and functioning nice for a long time. Our hitch is going to offer us a 5/8" hitch pin hole. This is standard, so as you can see our hitch pin fits in there perfectly. This kit is not going to include a pin and clip, but you can find one here at eTrailer.com.We are going to have rolled style safety chain loops.
Those look pretty nice on the back of here and they do accept most safety chains. And you can see the big clevis hook fits on there just fine, so you don't have to worry about your safety chains not fitting.My favorite visible feature of this hitch is going to be the reinforced steel collar. It just makes it looks more finished and adds a little bit of stability there on the end of our receiver.Now we can go ahead and get a few measurements for you, just to let you know where the hitch is going to sit on your Telluride. The measurement from the ground to the upper most part of our receiver tube is going to be right about 16". You just want to keep that in mind for ground clearance and if you need to use your ball mount on the rise or lowered position.
Now the measurement from the pin hole to the outermost part of our fascia, it's about 3-1/2". Now you just want to keep that number in mind for any folding accessories, that way they don't make contact with the back of your bumper.And as far as our weight capacities are concerned we are going to have a 750 pound tongue weight rating. That's going to be 750 pounds pushing straight down on our receiver tube. And as far as our trailer weight rating we are going to have a 5,000 pound rating. Keep in mind that is the weight of the trailer and the load included on the trailer.
Now one cool feature is this hitch is rated for weight distribution. Our tongue weight rating is going to stay the same at 750 pounds, but our trailer weight rating is going to bump up to 6,000 pounds. Now it is important to check your owner's manual and make sure that you're vehicle is capable of those numbers, and always go with the lowest number between the two.And as far as our installation is concerned it's really not that bad. We just have to do a little bit of trimming on our bumper. With all that being said I'll show you how to get it installed now.To begin our installation we want to raise our rear hatch and then we're going to lift up on this panel here. You can actually just lift this out of place. We now move over here to where our jack and everything is to remove our spare tire. So we're just going to lift up on this plastic panel. We'll set that off to the side. Then we can reach in and unhook our Velcro to grab everything we're going to need. Now we want to grab a flat bladed screwdriver and just remove this plastic cover here. That'll expose our nut to lower down our spare tire. So we can grab our tools provided, we'll start lowering down our spare. You just want to lift up and then turn our bracket here sideways, so it fits through the hole. You can now set this off to the side.We're now ready to remove our driver's side underbody panel. We're just going to grab a small flat blade screwdriver, slide it in through these openings, and then turn it sideways, and simply pull down on our fastener. You can now grab a 14 millimeter socket, we're just going to remove two plastic fasteners up here on the top. You want to hold the underbody panel with one hand because whenever we loosen the second one it's going to fall, just like that. You can now set it off to the side.We now need to support our exhaust using a cam buckle strap. We're going to take one hook and just slide it through our coil spring, and we'll run it over to the other side, do the same thing, then we'll pull it tight up against our exhaust. We're now ready to remove our exhaust isolators. We're just going to start with spraying some lubricant on there. You can use soap and water, anything you might have available. We just want to grab our pry bar, slide underneath our isolator, and pull our hangers off. There's going to be four of them we're removing.We are now ready to trim our underbody panel. There's going to be a diagram in the instructions to help you do this. Here's the section we're going to be cutting out. I'm just going to use a pair of tin snips. You can use a utility knife or a Dremel tool with a cut-off wheel. Just anything you have available.Now with an extra set of hands we can lift our hitch up into position. We have our long bolts with a conical tooth washer. You want to make sure that the teeth are facing towards the hitch. We're just going to slide these through the holes up here, just like that. We want to make sure to do that on both sides, from the inside to the outside. We're going to add that conical tooth washer, remember teeth facing towards the frame, and then a hex nut. You'll want to do this for all remaining hardware on the top.There are holes on the bottom, we're going to be adding our smaller bolts with our smaller conical tooth washers. Slide that over, teeth facing up just like the other ones, and I'll get these started. Now there is going to be four of these, two on each side. We now have our hardware on the bottom hand tight. We now want to come back with a 17 millimeter socket and just snug it down. You want to make sure to do this on both sides. We now want to grab a 19 millimeter wrench and socket, and just get this tightened down the rest of the way.We're now ready to come back and torque everything down. All of our torque specs are going to be listed in our instructions. We are now ready to reinstall our exhaust. We are now ready to reinstall our underbody panel in the reverse order we took it apart. You do want to make sure to reinstall your spare tire. And you can put our panel back in and we can close our hatch.That's going to conclude our look at and installation of Curt Class III's Trailer Hitch Receiver on our 2021 Kia Telluride.
Info for this part was:
Video Edited:
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Test Fit:
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Test Fit:
Clayton O
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Bradley B
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Daniel V.
5/31/2021
Great video. I would say that the quoted install time is on the lower side and that you should plan to triple this time estimate when installing yourself. I used a floor jack and jack stands. Main issue is getting bolts on/in in on the passenger side. There are two further rubber suspension bands for the exhaust on the lateral side and one further up toward the cat, i found it helpful to pop those off as well to drop the exhaust a bit lower down. I also popped off the heat shield on the medial side of the muffler to get a bit more clearance. Even doing all of this its tough to get the bolts in and torqued down on the passenger side, hence the increased install time. All of this being true I'm very happy with this product and it looks great. Definitely worth your time and money to save $500 plus on the kia model and the install/labor costs. 10/10 would buy again!