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Rob here at etrailer.com, and today you're going to be taking a look at the EcoHitch Custom Fit Trailer Hitch Receiver on our 2019 Chevy Bolt. Now, here is what our hitch is going to look like once we have it installed. You can see it's going to have a really clean factory look to it, and that's because our cross tube here is going to be completely hidden behind the bumper, and the only thing we're going to see is that receiver tube sticking out.Now, our EcoHitch is going to offer us a two inch by two inch receiver tube opening, which means we're going to have a really wide variety of options when it comes to accessories that we can mount up. If you want to take some bikes with you, we could put a bike rack in here. Maybe we need to make some room inside for passengers or pets, we can put a cargo carrier in our hitch, that way we have more room, or hook up a ball mount so we can tow a trailer.Now, regardless of what we're going to be putting in our hitch, all of our accessories are going to mount using the hitch pin hole here on the side. It is going to accept a standard five eighths pin and clip.
Now, these are not included in our kit, but you can pick them up here at etrailer.com, along with some locking devices so your accessories are secure.Now, if you are going to be towing a trailer, obviously you need a spot to hook up your safety chains, and our connection point is going to be a loop style welded to the bottom here, and as you can see, even with some of the smaller hooks, we should have plenty of room to get them hooked or unhooked. Now, you want to make sure that your hitch is going to be up to the task that we put it to, so as far as the weight rating goes, our hitch is going to have a 300 pound tongue weight, which is going to be great for some of those larger bike racks or really maximizing the space for our cargo carrier.Now, as far as the gross trailer weight rating goes, it's going to be rated at 2,000 pounds. Now, that's how much our hitch can pull including the trailer and everything we have loaded on it, but you do want to double check your Volt's owner's manual, because you don't want to exceed the manufacturers recommended weight. Now I would like to give you a few measurements, and these are going to help you out when you're looking for accessories for your new hitch, like a ball mount, a bike rack, or even a cargo carrier.From the center of the hitch pin hole to the outermost edge of the bumper is right about four and a half inches. Now, that measurement is going to help you out when you're looking at folding accessories to make sure you have enough room and they're not going to come in contact with the rear bumper.
From the ground to the inside top edge of the receiver tube opening, it's going to be right about 11 and three quarter inches.Now, that measurement is going to help when you're looking for a ball mount to make sure you have the appropriate rise or drop to match up to your trailer, but at the same time, at that height I would definitely recommend a bike rack or a car carrier that has a raised shank, that way we get a little bit more ground clearance out of it. Now we've seen what our hitch looks like and gone over some of the features, let's get it installed together.To start our installation, we want to open up our rear hatch. Now, if we come to the opening on our bumper here, where the hatch covers up, we're going to find a bolt on each side of the opening. We need to remove that, so you want to grab a T15 Torx bit and we'll pull those two bolts out. And we'll pull the other one out of the other side as well.
Now, if we come to very bottom side of our rear fascia, right behind our rear tires we're going to have a bolt holding the fascia to the wheel well liner. Again, we want to grab that T15 Torx bit and we're going to pull both of them out, one on each side.Now, if we move towards the center of our Chevy, we're going to have two pushpins holding the bottom of our fascia to the bottom of the trunk pan. So you need to take those out, so we'll grab a flat blade screwdriver, and there's a small notch, it's kind of hard to see but there's a little notch in there, we want to get our screwdriver in that notch so that we can separate the center section from the outer section of our pushpin. Sometimes they do get stuck a little bit, but again, you just want to pop out that center section, it's starting to come out, you can see there's lot of dirt and debris trapped in there.So you want to try your best not to break the pushpin, but we need to pull that center section out so it will relieve the tension, if it comes out that's fine, but then we need to come underneath the base of our pushpin and pull the rest of it out. We're going to repeat that for the other one as well.
So now we can move underneath our Volt, and if we come right to the back of the fascia so we can look inside, we just pull gently on the fascia and we look up towards the drivers side by our bumper beam, we're going to have this large connector.This is going to be connecting all our accessories and all the electronics to the bumper itself. So we want to grab this gray lever and rotate it up, and then I will release the plug, that way we don't have to worry about the wires catching when we go to pull the fascia off. Then we move right behind our rear tire, but we want to be inside the wheel well area. If we look inside, we see that we have three fasteners that are holding everything together. We need to remove those, so we'll grab that T15 Torx bit again and we're going to pull all three of those screws out.Now, it is a little limited on space, but you can see I can get a ratchet in there. You just want to be careful, you don't want to scratch the paint or possibly get it stuck against the tire. But we'll go ahead and pull all three of these screws out and we'll move to the other side and do the same thing. Now that those three screws are removed we want to move to the arch here that's going along the wheel well, the black plastic trim piece. We want to grab the edge of it and we're going to pull away, and we want to break it loose and have it disconnected at least to where our fender meets the fascia.So grab by the bottom, you kind of want to hold the panel of the car still so we can apply pressure and pull on that plastic panel. Now, again, we need to break it loose at least to this general area, and if you have the little clips come out, so long as they're not broken, we can put them back in. There's a little slot, we just want to slide it onto that black plastic piece so they can go back in. And now that we have it broke loose, we'll see that we have one more bolt right here, and again, that's going to be a T15 Torx bit, so we'll use that same socket.And we're going to have a bolt in the same location on the other side, so we'll remove that as well. Now, it's a good idea to grab an extra set of hands because we're going to be pulling our fascia off. Now, you want to start right where we pulled that bolt out at the corner where the fender meets the fascia, get ahold of it and we're just going to start pulling outward. It will be a little bit tight, but you just want to pull outward and start working your way towards the center so we can get everything loose.And since we already went ahead and disconnected that main harness underneath, we can set our fascia aside where it won't get damaged. With the fascia removed, that's going to expose our crash bumper or the bumper beam. Now this is also going to have to temporarily be removed, so if we look at the body here, it's going to be held on by three bolts, one on the top, one on the side, and one on the bottom. You want to grab a 15 millimeter socket and we'll pull all three of those bolts out on each side.Now, once the last nut is removed from the crash bar, you want to grab it, but we do have our wiring harness over on the driver's side here, so we don't want to pull it too far away, make sure we have enough slack, and I'm actually just going to rest it over here on the side so it won't be pulling on the wires. Then we grab our hitch and we're going to line it up over the stud that we removed our bumper beam from, and if you're worried about it falling, very loosely just install one of the nuts and that will keep it from falling off all the way.Then we'll grab our bumper beam, swing it back over, lining up the holes again that are in the studs, in this case obviously we need to remove the nut, put our bumper beam back over the studs, sandwiching our hitch in place and then, again, you just want to at least get one nut on each side so everything will hold itself against the body while we get the rest of the hardware back in place. I'm going to come back with that 15 millimeter socket and snug up all the nuts holding everything in place. I'm going to come back with the torque wrench and I'm going to torque them down to the manufacturer's specified amount. We'll go through and make sure that we torque down all of our hardware.Now, before we can put our fascia back in place, we are going to have to do a little bit of trimming. So I went ahead and marked out the initial cut that we're going to make, and we're going to find the diagram and the measurements in our instructions, but you do want to make sure you find the center point. Now, the easiest way I found the center point is we have a lot of reference points right here with these notches. If we measure from one notch to the other notch and divide that number by two, we can find our center point, and that's exactly what I did and then I just took the measurements and drew it out.Now, you can use a pair of tin snips, a razor knife, or whatever you have available to cut this, you just want to take your time and make sure the lines are nice and clean. I'm going to use a rotary tool so it will go by a little bit quicker. Now, once the initial cut is made, we do need to come back and make two secondary cuts, and those are going to be at the very edge of our fascia here, we're just going to have a little section we'll cut out, and again you'll find those measurements in your instructions. I'm just going to go back with my rotary tool and cut those out as well.Now, with an extra set of hands, we're going to put our fascia back in place. You kind of want to guide the opening around the receiver tube of your hitch, and then also make sure you put your wiring over the top of the crash bumper so that we can get everything in. Once we have everything lined up, start pushing our fascia back on, putting all the clips back in place, then we can start replacing all of our fasteners. And once you have the last one in, that will finish up your installation, and look at the EcoHitch on our 2019 Chevy Bolt.
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Scott R.
3/28/2021
It would be helpful to let people know that the hitch blocks the view of the wiring connector during reassembly, so you either need to try to connect it from above before the fascia is reconnected, or you need to do it blindly by feel from underneath. I put a piece of tape on the front side of the wiring harness connector so I knew which side should be facing out so that I was able to do it blindly,