Rear View Safety Backup Camera System Installation - 2012 Ford Flex

How to Install the Rear View Safety Backup Camera System on a 2012 Ford Flex

Speaker 1: Today, in this 2012 Ford Flex, we're going to review and install the rear-view safety backup camera system with the built-in backup sensors, part number RVS-5350.Let's go ahead and try it out. We'll back up out of our bay here. We got a motor coach behind us. That shows us how close we are. It does show it in meters, and there's no changing that, but you can see how close we get, and it beeps. It also kind of works at the same rate as the factory sensors.

When we're done, let's go ahead and just put it in drive. It turns off, and we don't have to worry about it no more.Nice big screen, easy to see and work with. It also has a little sunshade over top to help protect it. It's very simple to use. In fact, there's only one control for it.

Right here in the back is one simple little button, and all that does is silences it when the backup sensors are going off. Sometimes you just don't want them or, in this case, if your vehicle already has backup sensors, you really don't need two, but it's nice to have a visual picture of that. You will get that in the screen.To operate and use our camera, our car has to be on and in reverse. There's a gauge right here that gives you an idea of how far away the objects are. Greens would be pretty far away, you're safe distance, yellow getting closer, and red, yeah, you don't want to get into that part.

That looks all fine and dandy right now, but what's really cool is when the backup sensors work, so I'll go ahead and walk back there slowly, and you'll see how the sensors . you'll see the indicators on each side will show you how close the object is behind you.Now, you hear the factory sensor go off. As I get closer to it, I can set off the RVS camera sensors. Also, one neat feature back here is our camera is actually adjustable. You can move it up or down as needed.

This is a nice slim unit that sits above your license plate. The camera itself is really easy to install, especially on our Ford Flex here. This will fit a wide variety of vehicles as well. Just make sure you have clearance between here and here. We didn't have quite enough here, but we addressed that during our install.Now, comparing this to a wireless system, yeah, they're pretty cool. It's neat, a little bit less work, but with a hard-wired system like we have here, you're going to have a much clearer picture every time you use it compared to a wireless one where we may get interference every now and then, and the picture quality may not be so great.Let's go ahead and cover how we installed our camera system. First off, it does mount right here about the license plate area, and we do have to take off the license plate temporarily and install some fasteners. Now, these are the original fasteners right here. Now a quick check of our camera system. Make sure it lines with the holes because sometimes it will interfere with something on top. Sure enough, our holes don't line up with the original plate holes that are here and here, so what I do is just lower our plate just a little bit. Starting from here, lower it down just a little bit till you got to some new plastic and just made two new marks in there. I made sure I was directly below them and mark and drilled them out.This is the hardware that comes with the RVS camera system. It's very simple. Basically, I just found a drill bit that was just the same size or just a little bit smaller than that. I drilled it out and then I used this to thread into the plastic. Now, the drill bit I used is the 1364.Now the wire for our camera needs to go to the underneath the vehicle as well so, basically, I just enlarged the existing factory hole here for the license plate just enough that I can push this on through. Now, there is some foam structure behind this plastic right here, so you want to make sure you run your drill bit all the way through. Also, there are some wires right behind here. You kind of got to go by feel. You really can't see from the bottom if you got a hitch in place. Make sure you don't hit those wires with your drill bit. You'll go right over the bumper structure and through the styrofoam, and you'll be okay. You can actually reach up, feel for those wires, and push them up out of the way as well.At this point, we can go ahead and remount our license plate and our camera. Starting on the driver side, I'll line up the holes and install the hardware. Okay, you still want it to move around. I'm going to do one little additional over here on the other side. I'm going to put a little washer behind the license plate. Here's our other bolt, license plate, and just a plain flat washer. Basically, I just want to keep it spaced out enough, give some room for our wire, so when we tighten it down then the wire doesn't get smashed down any more than it has to. This also comes with a couple little caps right here to give it a little more finished look.The next component we're going to take a look at is this really long cable right here. This is going to plug into the back of the camera. It also has two small wires, a black and a red, which are going to go to our tail light area, which will eventually hook up to a reverse light signal. These are the two wires right here, they're very long when you see them in the kit, are going to go to the front of the vehicle. We'll leave those alone for now, so we'll take this in here and plug into our camera. I'm going to run it through this bracket right here to help hold it up.Here's our camera end. That's going to be hard to see, but there's a very tiny arrow marked on here on both sides, so you line them up and you push them together. You could also go by feel because it only goes in one way. Just don't try to mash it. You just twist it til it clicks. I also like to wrap some electrical tape around this connections as well just to help ensure that it stays together and a little bit of weather-proofness. To help support our wire, I'm going to use a loom clamp. Doesn't come with the kit, but I use that to help support the wire at the connection point. I use a self-tapping screw that uses a quarter-inch nut driver to attach it. Make sure you go into metal and not into the plastic.To remove a taillight, it's pretty easy. We'll need a 5/16 socket. Remove the screws here and here. A wide trim panel tool right here will help pop it loose from the snap fittings. Then, to disconnect the light wiring, push down this tab right here. Push in a little bit and pull it apart. Remember these two wires here Let's go ahead and trace those up back towards the taillight. The red wire needs to tap into a reverse light circuit. We discovered that the green with the orange stripe right here is our reverse light wire, so we stripped it back on this side, twisted the wires together to hold these two together, and we'll add a heat shrink butt connector. I'm going to use a heat gun to help shrink our butt connector and keep it weather-tight.The little black wire here needs to go directly to ground, so this piece of the bodywork will work just fine. We use a ring terminal and another number eight screw that uses a 1/4-inch nut driver. To bundle our wires together, I'm going to use some loom material. It's just going to help keep it together, especially as it goes around the corner down at the bottom. This helps to protect the wire from bouncing around a little bit.The two long wires here, we need to run up to the front of the vehicle and up underneath the passenger seat area, so I ran our wires up. I used another loom clamp right here. We zip-tied to the fuel filler neck here over the rear sub-frame where it met up with the parking brake cable here. We basically installed that all around on down, up towards the front. Zip-tied it in various places as we go along.And all the way up to where our parking brake cable was on the inside. Then I drilled out a 9/16 hole for my wires. This is the other end of the two long lengths wire so we have the RCA cable and this little two-pronged cable right here. We had to come inside the vehicle so what we had to do is drill a hole through the floor pan right here. And to access to that we removed a couple of pieces here that are trim so we could pull up our carpeting.Just lay this here in place for now. So it just simply pops up. You may want to use your trim panel tool here. There's three snaps so you just gently pull straight up and it comes right out. Around the corner here, this piece we're going to remove also. Pull it from here and kind of work it up that way. It does come apart. Again you have a few snaps . again you have a couple of snaps to pull out and away.Then you can work the carpet loose where I drill a 9/16 hole in the steel right next to where you see the parking brake cable coming through right here. And yes, I already had my cable ran through and I do not have a grommet in there yet because the hole that I drilled out is just big enough for a plug but it's also the same size as my grommet. Easy fix so let's go ahead and modify our grommet, slip it over the wires and put it into place.I'm actually using a snap bushing. It's very simple. I'm just going to take some pliers, put a split in it and put our wires in it and then put it into place. This doing it kind of minimizes how big the hole you got to put into it, into the floor pan and then you just push it into place. You may or may not hear a click but there are some catches on it to keep it from backing out.After we run our wires back through the other two holes that the other wires went we'll run this up towards the strut and the engine compartment, along the firewall here and straight up. We'll make sure we stay away from anything moving like the suspension components or anything hot like the exhaust. Not much to attach to so you might want to use another loom clamp to hold the wire up.Okay. That one wire with the two smaller wires I had to extend it to come up through here because it just wasn't long enough to reach our fuse box right here. Just ran it up. Again I used some loom material just to keep the two wire together. Ran it to our fuse panel box right here. Pull open this tab. Rotate it up and out of the way and you can see how we tapped into it.Now our fuse tap is going to be part number F2526. So we ran our wire into here. We actually made a notch in it with some diagonal pliers and just made a notch so our wire will fit in there just fine, where our lid will sit on top of it and not mash the wire. We used another heat-shrink butt connector and here's our fuse tap. I'll pull it out of the way. So we use this fuse right here. We tested this fuse and found out this fuse is only hot when the key is on the run position.When the key is out this fuse is not hot. We took the factory fuse and put it in down below and for our new fuse, for our camera on top here. Both are 10 amps. We'll carefully put our lid back into place. We'll put it behind this bar right here for the hinge. Pull it back up through and then slowly rotate it down until it snaps. Now our black wire we added another ring terminal inaudible 00:12:15 right here.Moving on to our monitor here, I just got it sitting here on top of the dashboard. This is the general location. The actual location is really personal preference but it has adhesive to hold it into place. And basically this little bit of trim right here, I'll just push it up a little bit, out of the way and I work that wire on the back of the monitor underneath to here. The monitor has multiple ends.Now don't worry. We don't use all of these guys. Now our monitor has to have power so it's going to have it's own little separate lead that plugs together just like this. This one gets ran through the grommet out underneath and eventually to our fuse panel up front, underneath the hood. We'll hook up our RCA cable. They are labeled AV1, AV2. For testing before I installed it I used AV2 and it worked just fine.And then our last wire with the two prongs will fit in here just like that, line up the catches, push it together. And all of this will be hidden inside here behind this panel. Now to remove this panel it's very simple. It's just kind of recesses inside here and I just worked my way with a trim panel tool, just kind of worked it out until it unsnapped. And you have a few more snaps that the rest of the pieces we've been working with but it does come out fairly easy.Also, this little trim right here just have to hold it back always bit to work it out. Now these connections here, I've actually seen these come apart over time so it's always good to wrap some electrical tape around them. It just gives a little extra mechanical security. We're not really sealing it from anything. We're just keeping it together. With all our connections made we can go ahead and reinstall all our panels.Make sure the wires don't get pinched in between there and our excess wire we just simply hide behind the carpeting. So we reassemble our plastic. This part goes in first. Now these two prongs line up here and here and we want here and here. Again, double-check to make sure no wires are in the way and it pops right back into place. Let's try it out and test it. Key in the run position, hold the brake down. We'll put it in reverse. Hey we got a picture. That's what we want.Now that we know that it works we'll go ahead and double-check our wires and fill up our hole that we made be using some Loctite silicone. We'll be using part number LT37467. We can go ahead and reassemble our light. Everything snaps together with the connection. Line up the pins, push in place and reinstall the fasteners. With that that will finish it for the rear-view safety backup camera system, part number RVS-5350 on this 2012 Ford Flex.