Hey there, how y'all doing, Cris from Crutchfield tech support here again,
and today we're working on a 2009 Toyota Highlander. We're going to be adding a head
unit and a backup camera. Speaking of which, I've already got the dashboard ripped apart,
and the head unit I've got prepped...I'll be able to put that in relatively quick.
Next stage for me is to get to the back of the car here and rip things apart a little bit;
carefully, of course, we don't want to break things. This procedure is pretty similar on almost any
SUV. All right, so now in order to get started we've got a little disassembly to do, like I told you,
at the back of the car here. Just a few panels. First thing I'm gonna do is gonna pop out
this little handle cover. Got a 10 mil bolt up inside here. Now this is not identical on every car,
but the concepts are going to be similar. Taking these things apart is not that difficult to do.
Be sure to save your parts; I keep a magnet around for all the metal stuff, I just put it on the back
of a speaker. So I've got that out of there, this little panel here doesn't necessarily have to come
out. In this particular car there's nothing really in behind it, but I do just so I don't lose it. Now
on this here I've gotta have this one overlapping, so I've got to take this top section down first.
Now I already popped...sorry, I already popped this little panel loose here, I'm around the lift,
we got that in here. So we're gonna pull down this section first, it's just held in by clips.
There we go, work that across, get that down out of there, save that. We'll want to put that back
later on, obviously can't leave the car not trimmed; my wife would not put up with that.
Get our third piece out, and then the big panel here on this particular car the only bolt that
was holding it was that one right there, that 10 mil I took out that had the strap, and the
rest of this is just clips. So now it's a matter of pulling it down and getting the clips loose,
like so.
All right, so continuing on with our SUV install for the camera,
we're going to need to plan our route for the wiring on the car. So I know the license
plate is going to be where the license plate belongs, on the back here, and my wire's going
to run up in through here somewhere. I'm probably going to end up drilling a hole for this later.
So it's going to come in through the back here, so I will follow the natural path of the factory
wiring as they've got it loomed around here, I'll end up zip-tying my cable to this later on
I need to make it through this obstruction here, and I can see there's some space. Lots of cars have
this kind of a setup where they've got a cable running in. It gets plugged into another cable
that runs into the inside of the car, so when I get this down out of here I'll be able to unplug this.
There we go, there's a couple of cables in here, I'm going to unplug these for now to
get them out of my way a little bit. We're going to need to take this weather stripping along here
loose so that we can get up inside the headliner, because we're going to take and follow the path of
the wiring basically through the headliner. We're going to stay to the inside of the headliner a bit,
stay away from the airbags. So we'll have to pull more of the weather stripping up
further up in the front. There's a piece at the back, and got this loose
so I'll be able to pull this guy down here and get in, and then this boot here pulls down
and I can actually feed the wires back through here. These little connectors, it's going to make
it easier for me to work with this later on. I'm also going to pop this piece up here, so I reach
up inside, should be able to push it up. There we go, and get that out of there, now that's going to be
a tricky part later on. I'm going to need to use something like this wire fish, and probably also
add some soap to it, meaning it's going to need a little bit of lubrication to pull the cable back
through this boot here, and the object of the game for the video cable and power cable for the camera
is to get it from the far end of the car back here with the shortest route possible. All right, so now
I'm crawling up inside the SUV, I've got to get a few things out so that I can get the headliner to
have a little bit of sway, a little bit of play for me. I'm not taking the headliner out of the vehicle,
that would be just overkill, way too much work, but what I have done here is I've loosened up
this bolt here, and this piece once I get it down there's a mirrored image piece of it on the other
side. I don't need to take it down from both sides, because again, I'm going to run my cable
up through the headliner here. It's going to travel roughly right there up through the vehicle. So
save the parts in my cup holders in the neighborhood of where the things are.
Simple panel popper tool, you can get these on our website. Obviously this clip here I started pulling
down already, it's a christmas tree-style clip, pulled that down, got that out, and that's just to
let the headliner have a little bit of play, come down for me. Hold this just a little bit loose,
it doesn't have to go far because I'm going to use a fish to run over top of this, so I'll stash that
there along with a couple I've already pulled from back here. I've got a couple of clips out,
and that's going to give me the flexibility I need to pull the headliner down just enough to fish my
cable through with a wire fish later on. All right, so now one of the things that you want to do
is pay attention to where you send your fish through your car and how you send your fish
through your car. I'm going to need to pull that cable, I don't really want to try to push that
cable, so I'm going to just send my fish through from the back here where I have my target location
where I need my wire to arrive, and I'm feeding it through above the headliner up there towards my
side passenger door there on the rear. Push that almost all the way in through there because
it's just about long enough to get there, and there it is, it arrived right where I wanted it
came down behind, so now I get a little bit of my tape because I need to get my
cable safely attached for the time being so that I can get it to follow through with the
fish going to the back. Wrap this tape around, and again, I'm just using cloth tape for this, I'm not
using electrician's tape. This stuff comes off cleaner, comes off better, this is going to go
up and over past those clips. So I've got it started from this end,
and I'll come around here. I've got it attached at the other end,
and there we go. Thanks to my fish, I'm able to get my wire where I need it to be. All right, so word
of note, make sure you don't try to bring your cable around the outside of your weather stripping.
We need to follow that same route that these factory wires were following through this boot.
Some vehicles, this this pass-through clip here you might have to drill a
little hole or something in, but with this one I can actually take these plugs off of
this little bracket, get them out of the way. There we go. So it needs to come through that same area,
so at this point I'm just fishing it up and through the opening that I
actually want it in rather than going around the outside of my trim. So to start with, I'm going to
get a little bit of lubrication on the end of this piece here, a little bit of soap going on,
and this is going to be a little difficult to do. Not as hard as it would be if I didn't put any
soap on it. Now I'm through the boot like so, and I'm gonna need to attach my cable to that. Okay, so
I was having a little trouble with the bulk of the fish; it doesn't look very big, but it does add bulk
with the the wire pulling through. So what I did was I went into the install bay and I grabbed me a
piece of scrap wire here, speaker wire, anything will do. A small much smaller piece, it's going to
have less bulk than this piece, and with any good fortune I've taped it to the end of my cable here,
and we'll be able to get it to pull through there. So now that came right on through, no trouble,
gonna pull that along give a little pull, give a little more wiggle and stretch, a little bit
more pull, and there we go, there's our 12 to six-volt converter, and we can pull that on through
and we can pull our power wires on through, and that boot gets to be pushed back in place there.
I've got to fish it up. Now this boot is going to go back into its original position
and the same place I took it out of earlier, so I'm just going to feed this up in here,
following that natural pathway that the factory wiring gave me to take through the vehicle.
Get this all pulled through. We're getting our factory stuff back into position here momentarily.
I've got to feed these guys back up in. Now watch out for any little clips or anything, make sure
that you don't bite the wire because you don't want to do all this work to get the video cable
run from one end of your car to the other and then not be able to actually get a picture from it.
So there's my factory connectors coming back up through, there's my aftermarket cable I've added,
now I can push this boot back into place, snap that in. So now, just like it was when we started. That's
back to factory there, and while I've got it apart, this is the time to take my cable through here.
Now we can get these guys back where they belong. There we go, we snap that back into position.
All right, so now we've got our camera cable almost completely run, we've just got to get it
up and over. And over here and we'll be making power and ground connections here
shortly. All right, so right now I'm just managing my cables, routing them; I talked about earlier how
we're gonna get these guys to follow around the the natural direction that the factory wiring ran.
So this is my actual camera cable, I've got it run in through the back where the factory camera was
at, I'm gonna zip-tie it into a few spots up in here so it's not clanking around. There'll
be a little bit of extra cable, I'm going to just tie that off up in here when I get to it. I've got
to get this connected to this, I will just follow their lead here and run it right on around here,
and the extra I will zip-tie over inside there. All right, so plugging in the 4-pin to 4-pin, this
carries all the power and ground and video signals through this one junction point. These cameras have
little tiny arrowheads pointing them in the right direction, so when you plug them together nice and
tight, all your power and ground and everything is going to go out through into the camera itself.
So I've got to get this black wire over here. Now I'm going to connect the power
up at the front of the vehicle, so when I peel these guys apart, the power wire and the ground
wire here at the back, I'm actually not going to use the red wire back here. So now I've made
my chassis ground. Remember, I'm not going to have to hook up that red wire because I'm getting
power from the front through the convenience wire, so I can plug my various connectors in back here
and prep to get my camera going now. Then I'm going to bury everything in the car. So now
this last stretch, it's going to actually end up being inside of my weather strip going down here
to bring it around up to the back of the stereo. So basically, between
the back and the front here I've cut in between the two airbag sections
so I can get it to the outside of this section, because when this blows, if it does ever,
it'll not pull this cable with it, it'll just come down out from behind the seam
like it's supposed to. Made it behind the weather strip with the weather strip,
there we go, and we'll just lay it on in there,
bring it on down. So we've hidden it in the weatherstripping itself coming down
and down here near the bottom. I will cut just a little notch
on the interior of that to get the cable over.
Bring it down here, and we'll stick that back on tight in a few minutes. There, so I'm tucking the
video cable in behind the carpeting all the way up. This way, I didn't have to take the glove box out
and gear it up behind it or anything like that,
just behind the carpeting up at the front there,
and that goes there, and then I will bring it up to the radio location with the fish. All right,
and like so.
I ran the fish down through there first,
now that's extra cable, and I will stash that down here under the carpet later once I pull
back my slack. All right, so wrapping up the installation on the camera, head unit, 2009
Highlander. It's an SUV, it's very pretty much typical. The disassembly that I showed you
the pass for the wiring, all these kinds of things, tips and tricks, it's pretty standard stuff. Gonna
fire things up here and test things out make sure everything's working and get the car back
to the owner. If you have any questions, you need information, check out our website crutchfield.com.
Give one of our advisors a call, we'll be glad to help you out. You all have a good day now, take care.