EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch Installation - 2014 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen

Products Featured in this Video

EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch Receiver - Custom Fit - 2"

109 reviews

Code: 306-X7284

Price:  $375.64

• Trailer Hitch
• Custom Fit Hitch
• Class II
• 300 lbs TW
• 2000 lbs GTW

• 2 Inch Hitch
• Concealed Cross Tube
• EcoHitch

This custom-fit trailer hitch with a hidden cross tube installs behind your vehicle's rear bumper, leaving only the receiver visible beneath it. Aluminum and steel alloy construction is durable and eco-friendly. Powder coat finish resists rust.

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How to Install the EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch on a 2014 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen

Hey guys, how's it going, Conner here at etrailer.com Today we're going to be taking a look at the EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch Receiver for our 2014 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen. So our EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch is going to be an excellent option for our Jetta here. It's going to give us the larger two inch receiver tube opening. And what that's going to do is that's going to allow us to carry a greater amount of bikes. It's going to give us more bike racks and cargo carriers to choose from that we can also use for towing as well. So the EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch is actually going to be the best option for a Volkswagen Jetta.

And the reason for this number one, as we discussed, it's the only option with the larger two inch receiver tube opening, so we're going to have a lot more accessories we can choose from. And number two, as we can see here, it has a very hidden factory like appearance. We don't have any cross tube hanging down below the rear bumper like we would with some of the other options. The only part we're going to see is the required receiver tube opening here. So it makes for a very clean and sleek factory, like look.

So I personally love the EcoHitch Trailer Hitches, as we can see here, we have a nice collar around the outside of the receiver tube, which just gives a nice seamless look. We have a hammered powder coat finish, which again, just sort of blends in with the vehicle. It doesn't stick out as much like some of the shinier powder coat options. So you could see on the side here, we have two safety chain loops. We can you use these standard S type hooks.

We can also use the larger clevis hooks if we need to as well. On the side, we're going to have our standard 5/8 inch diameter hitch pin. Keep in mind, these hitch pins are going to be sold separately. We have these etrailer.com. We have these standard ones like you see here, or we have locking ones as well, if you would like to upgrade.

So these are going to hold our ball mounts, our bike racks our cargo carriers in place with the hitch pin here. As we can see, we have plenty of room between the hitch pin hole in the safety chain loops, which can be an issue on other trailer hitches. So in regards to installation, this is going to be something you can do at home. Keep in mind, you have to remove the rear bumper. However, I will say after my experience installing trailer hitches on vehicles and removing the rear bumper, this Jetta definitely has one of the easier rear bumpers to remove. Now something that Torklift does that I really like is they come with this protective strip here. So we actually have to make a cut in the rear lower bumper facia. I wouldn't worry too much, this isn't extremely visible from outside the vehicle, but they give you a nice little protective panel here, which is going to hide all your cut marks and it just makes for a really clean look. Now we have a couple of measurements for you. They're going to help when you're selecting your hitch mounted accessories, such as a Ball Mount or a bike rack or cargo carrier. Now the first measurement we have is from the ground to the top inside edge of the receiver tube opening. This is going to be about right at 12 inches. This is going to be a useful measurement for selecting our Ball Mount, that way we get the correct rise and drop according to the height of our trailer coupler. And 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 this is going to be a useful measurement. Where we're selecting our folding bike racks and folding cargo carriers. That way we make sure when they're in the stowed position, they don't contact the vehicle. So the distance from the center of the hitch pin hole out to the outside edge of the bumper is going to be about two, two and a half inches. Now that we've gone over some of the benefits and features, let's go ahead and show you how to install this trailer hitch yourself. So to start our installation today, we need to open the hatch on our vehicle. And the reason that we need to do this is because the taillights are going to have to come off. In order to remove the taillights, there's going to be three nuts, which we need to remove on the inside of the vehicle. In order to do this, you're going to need a 16 millimeter socket. Once we're inside the vehicle here, there's going to be two access panels we need to remove in order to review the nuts to remove our taillight assemblies. So we're going to show you the driver's side here, cause there's a bit more panels to remove, so it's going to be a little bit more challenging for you. So we're going to simply just turn these knobs here. It's going to allow us to sort of pry back this panel here. Once we have that back, we're going to take our other flap here. Just sort of bend this back if you will. And in here we can see one of the nuts we need to remove. There's also going to be two more, one on the top, one on the bottom over here. So we'll take our 16 millimeter socket. Gotta be careful we don't drop those in between that little section Get our other two fasteners out. So now that we have our fasteners removed, I'm going to go ahead and stick my hand on the inside of the vehicle and use it to push the taillight out. May need to wiggle back and forth in order to get it to free up. And before we remove the taillight completely, there's a connector on the inside we're going to show you that needs to be removed first. I'm going to reach my hand around the inside of the vehicle here and remove the connector by pressing the tab at the top. I know you can't see this. I'll try to show you once we get it out. We would take a look here, we see the two matching connectors on the taillight, the pigtail on the vehicle. You can see it matches on the housing here. Now we need to come on either side of the vehicle here and remove these two Torx fasteners we see here, which are going to be directly below the taillights. In order to do this, we're going to need a T-30 Torx bit, and we're going to have two on each side of the vehicle. So we need to remove both of those. And again, just go ahead and repeat this process on the other side. Now that we have the Torx bits out, we're going to have two pushpin fasteners we need to remove on either side of the vehicle. Now these are going to be super hard to see they're basically going to be joining our quarter panel here to our rear bumper facia. It's going to be a push pin that goes up into the quarter panel here. Now again, I can barely see these myself, so it's going to be really hard to show you. But essentially right below the quarter panel here, we're going to take a small flat blade screwdriver, and we're going to just try to pry the center section down and out. But yeah, there'd be a, the push pin is going to be right here. The side we need to remove is going to be on the bottom side, where the fascia is. Here's this inner section that we need to remove. Again I just took a small flat blade screwdriver, wedged it in-between the outer edge there and just pry down. And once we have that center section removed, we should be able to come up top, just push the rest of it out. I'll show you what that looks like as well. So yeah, again, the fastener goes in the center here. We just used our flathead screwdriver to pry this down and out. Once that's down, you can come up top and push it the rest of the way out. And again, we have one on either side, you need to remove both of those. Now we need to come on the inside of the wheel well here and we need to remove three Torx bits from the inside of the fender well. We have one here at the bottom. You have one in the middle and we have one at the top round right here. In order to remove these, we're going to need a T-20 Torx bit. And again, we have three on this side, we also have three on the other side, we need to remove as well. Now we can move on to the other side and remove those as well. Now we need to come under the vehicle here. We're going to have some additional Torx fasteners. We're going to have three in the middle here, which we need to remove using a T-30 Torx bit. And then we're going to have two on the outside of each side, which we need to remove. Those are going to be a T-20 Torx bit. Well upon further inspection, there's actually only going to be two Torx bits on the passenger side. There isn't two on the driver's side as well. So again, it's going to take our T-20 Torx bit, and remove those. So now starting in location one over here on the passenger side, we can now pull the bumper facia off. In order to do this, we're going to pull straight out away from the vehicle. Just like so. Hang onto it as best we can. Now we can go ahead and set this aside in a safe place. Now that we have the bumper fascia off, we need to go ahead and remove this foam pad here, which is attached to the bumper beam. Now it's just glued on here, so we should be able to pull it back, but to be careful not to break it, there's just some glue holding it on, just going to use my trim panel tool, pry it away. We can set this aside. Now, the next step, once we have this foam piece off is actually to remove the bumper beam, the core support whatever you want to call it. We're going to be using a 13 millimeter socket. We have three bolts on either side of the bumper beam those all need to come out. I'm going to leave that one threaded in, so it doesn't fall off when I remove the others. Now that we just have our last bolt, I'm going to use my other hand to grab the bumper beam, pull this off. And again, we can go ahead and set this aside. Now we can take our cross member here. Once we have it off the vehicle, as you can see here, we have a tab on this side and we have two more tabs on the other side over here. We need to flatten those tabs down, so they're not, so they're flush with the mounting surface here. So what we're going to do is I'm going to make sure I have my safety glasses on, we're going to take a hammer, I'm gonna use my knee to sort of brace the cross beam here. I'm just going to hammer these down. So they're flush with the mounting flange. And again, I have two more on the other side I need to do as well. Then we need to come under the vehicle here. As you can see you here, we have our exhaust hanger, which is attached to our rubber isolator. We're going to want to remove the hanger side from the muffler from this isolator. If we have a model with dual exhaust, we need to do that on both sides. So I'm going to go ahead and take some general purpose lubricant here, just spray the isolator down. It's going to be a lot easier to work with. And once that's done, we're going to go ahead and use a pry tool or an exhaust hanger removal tool, if we have one of those on hand. And then pry out the hanger from the isolator. Now it's going to be a good idea to support your exhaust however, we don't have that much room until we going to hit in the sub-frame there. So we don't have to worry about the exhaust hanging down too far and causing any damage. Just like that. So now we're going to come on the backside here and have a little metal clip that's holding our heat shield and it's pinning it up inside the body. So we need to go ahead and pry this heat shield down. So we have better access when we're installing our trailer hitch. We're just going to take a pry tool here, sort of wedge it in between the heat shield and our body. You should be able to pry it off just like that. Before we place the hitch on the vehicle, we need to go ahead and get our hardware ready. We're going to be using the M8 bolts supplied with our kit, as well as an M8 lock washer, a M8 flat washer, and a M10 flat washer. The sequence we're going to do is, we're going to first install the M8 lock washer, the M8 flat washer, and then the M10 flat washer just like that. As you can see here, we have a little bit of a road grime in our threads here, so we're going to go ahead and take some spray lubricant, as well as a nylon brush, which we carry here at e-trailer. We're just going to do our best to clean these out before we insert our hardware, so we don't have any issues with damaging the threads. So we're going to go ahead and take our hitch, take our hardware that we assembled earlier. We're going to set everything in place on the vehicle. Now, since we have sort of these tabs that are going to line up in the vehicle frame here, we should be able to do this by ourself. Just going to get one of them started here and we'll get one started on the other side. So won't have to worry about the hitch falling on us. Now we can go ahead and reinstall the rest of our bolts. Keep in mind, everything's just going to be hand tight for this step here. So now once we have the hitch secured to the vehicle, we can begin the next step. For this we're going to need our pull wire here. We're going to want to come to the passenger side of the frame rail we're going to see a hole in there. So that access hole, what we're going to do is we're going to take the coiled end of our pull wire, we're going to feed it through, come out on the other end. On the other end, we are going to feed our 7/16 hex head bolt through. Now we do need to pay attention to these spacers and washers that we have on here. We're going to start out with our star washer, our flat washer and our spacer block. Once we have those on there correctly, take the coiled end of our pull wire thread that onto the bolt. We're going to slip the spacer block through there first and then grab onto the other side of the pull wire, so we don't lose it. Then we can try to fish it through this access hole. A little pull wire, I'm using my finger on the other side to sort of help guide it into place. Just like so. Now we can take our pull wire off. We don't want to pull this because we are going to be using this on the other side, so we're just going to unthread it. We can go ahead and take our two 7/16 inch flat washers, place those on, followed up by a split lock washer. Then finally, our hex nut. So now we want to go ahead and repeat this process on the driver's side of the framework as well, fishing our bolt wire into the inside of the frame and securing it with our nut and lock washers. So before we torque the 7/16 inch hex bolts that we inserted in the frame, we're going to go ahead and take a 13 millimeter socket. And we're going to snug up our bolts, which are holding the hitch to the body of the vehicle. So the reason we went ahead and snugged up the bolts, which secure our hitch to the body of the vehicle is because we want the hitch to be into position. When we torque these bolts, these 7/16 inch hex bolts on the side first. In order to torque these down, we're going to need an 18 millimeter socket for the nut end and a 16 millimeter wrench for the head on the bolt. And the torque specifications are going to be listed in your instructions, so just make sure you follow these. So we can go ahead and repeat this on the other side as well. So now that we have our 7/16th inch hex bolts torqued down, securing the trailer hitch to the inside of the frame, we can go ahead and remove our M8 bolts, which are holding the outer hitch plate to the body because we're going to be reinstalling the bumper beam over our plate here. We're going to take our bumper beam here and we're going to test fit it on our hitch. So if you see, if you take a look at the bottom edge of our bumper beam here, you can see there's going to be a small gap between the hitch plate and our bumper beam. Therefore, we need to install these spacers the EcoHitch provides for us. This is going to take care of that gap so we can make sure everything is sitting flush. So we'll take the bumper beam back off. So these are what our plates are going to look like. And they're going to sit flush with the hitch here. And our bumper beam is going to attach to that. That's going to sandwich them together. It's going to get rid of that gap we just had. We'll take our bumper beam here, if you have an extra set of hands for this part, that's definitely gonna help. But I think I should be able to get this by myself Align our plate, like so. Take our hardware. Just get a couple threads started to hold everything in place. We'll come on the other side, do the same thing. Now we're just going to go ahead and reinstall the rest of our bolts with our spacer block in place. Keep in mind, you may or may not need the spacer block. That's why it's important that we test it. The bumper beam onto the trailer hitch first. Now I'm going to hold this spacer in place, so I make sure it doesn't jut out on us or anything. I'm just going to go ahead and tighten our bolts down using our 13 millimeter socket. Once this is done, then we can come back with our torque wrench and torque, everything to the final specifications in the instructions. So in case you're wondering our foam cover that we removed from the bumper beam earlier will not be re-installed. So we can go ahead and throw this away. Before we re-install the bumper facia back on the vehicle. We need to go ahead to make a cutout for the receiver tube on our trailer hitch. So the instructions call for a five and a quarter inch wide by four and a half inch tall, cut out in the center of the bumper. We see here in the center of the bumper there's actually going to be this extended tab here, which is going to be a good guide for us to use. Now, once we have our cutout marts, we're going to be using a pair of tin snips. If you have a razor blade on hand that should get through this as well, any sort of cutting tools, such as Dremel should be able to make this cut fairly easy. So we're just going to come on the outside of our line here. And once we have our opening to the approximate size we need, we're going to go ahead and test that the bumper facia on the vehicle, to see if it clears our receiver tube. Now we're just going to roughly set the patient in position. Yeah, it looks like we got plenty of clearance. So we're going to go ahead and take the bumper back off, we're going to clean up our edges here, and we're going to install the protective strip that EcoHitch provides. So we went ahead and trimmed our protective trim piece here to the size we think we need it. Now we can just go ahead and install it, like, so. Just like that, now that we have our protective trim piece installed you can go ahead and refit the bumper facia on the vehicle. If you have an extra set of hands, that's definitely going to make this easier, but it can still be done with one person. Now that we have the bumper fascia back on the vehicle, you can just go ahead, re-install all of our fasteners that we took off earlier. And then our last step here, once we have all our bumper fasteners on, just to make sure we reattach the exhaust. Now that we have everything buttoned up, that's going to do it today for the EcoHitch Hidden Trailer Hitch Receiver for our 2014 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen..