My friend came by today to help me install my TeslaOffer trunk kit and ended up doing 90% of the heavy lifting. The CANBUS connector was super-easy to hook up and glad they were able to supply the proper plug and play connector for my 2018 (2019+ have a different connector).
Likes:
- extra clips for the trim panel on the trunk as some broke when I removed the panel.
- even though some previous instructions I had said to have wire-cutters, not one single wire needed to be cut. Seems they've refined things so that not cutting, splicing is needed
- super smooth and quiet and always opens or closes with a single activation of touchscreen, fob, phone app, foot sensor, etc.
Dislikes:
- actually I have nothing negative to say about the kit other than there was a connector that wasn't used. We were scratching our heads what to do with it and only realized it was not used after re-watching a video. better if it was either cut off or labelled to indicate it is not to be used
- other dislikes were pain points during the install process. Getting two torx screws off holding bumper was a pain as there were seized on and why they use torx that are twice as long as required were odd. Power at VCright was not difficult to access and (at least in my 2018) VCright is not hidden behind a connector but the difficulty is that you can only get your left hand up there with a small 10mm socket and after you put the fork spade connector under the 10mm nut and tighten, it pushes the connector out as you tighten. This probably took 10 minutes rather than 10 seconds. Lastly the weather stripping around the trunk opening was difficult to reinstall properly. Before you remove this, you might want to put painter's tape at the edge of your bumper right where it meets the weather strip so that when you reinstall it you know how far to push it back down otherwise you won't get a good seal and the seal may be riding too high and interrupt the trunk closing.
Install notes:
- my friend is super picky about running cabling so we (or I should say, he) actually removed the bumper cover and the metal bumper support behind it. This gave the best clearance for running the 2 strut cables.
- Left strut cable went through blue round grommet on the left, right strut cable went through a factory body-colored grommet on the right corner and the foot sensor cable went though the oval blue grommet on the right. For the body-colored grommet it was removed and discarded. The grommet pre-attached to the right strut cable fit perfectly on this hole. For the two blue grommets, most people use a blade to cut slits to pass the cables through. I chose to hole punch them for perfectly round holes and then siliconed each one for extra water resistance.
- for cable management, I designed and 3d printed some cable clips that were attached using VHB. These were used in spots that zip-ties couldn't if there was no where to fasten the zip-tie.
- the main control box was double sided taped to the amp bracket. I didn't want to adhere to the sub enclosure to minimize vibration of the control box.
The whole process took just over 5 hours which felt like a long time but no corners were cut and the goal was to not have any water egress problems.
Now I patiently wait for the power frunk kit to arrive.