etrailer | Set up: Stealth Hitches Hidden Rack Receiver on a 2018 Audi Q5

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Hello neighbors, it's Brad here at etrailer and today we're taking a look and installing the Stealth Hitch Rack Receiver on a 2018 Audi Q5. Now this is what your hitch is gonna look like when it's installed and you're probably wondering well where is it, and that's why it has the name Stealth Hitch because it's gonna keep your Audi looking nice and clean and OEM and still have that nice luxury appearance until you need to use your two inch rack receiver. And that way, when you wanna load up your cargo carriers or bike racks you can just pop that into place and you're ready to go. Now this can only be used with bike racks and cargo carriers or other suspended accessories. This is not meant for a ball mount or towing. And if you are planning on towing your trailer I highly recommend picking up the towing kit as it'll come with a seven pole and four pole.
Now our two inch receiver tube opening is going to be great, again for a bunch of different bike racks or cargo carriers. It's a pretty standard size and this one has a tongue weight rating of 600 pounds. So that means you can load up a four bike bike rack with a bunch of bikes or a cargo carrier and it's gonna work great for that. But all of them are gonna stay in place with a five eights pin and clip which is not included with this, so you are gonna wanna pick one of those up. Now what I really like about this is you can lock this in place.
There is a spot for your key to turn that tumbler and no one's gonna be able to walk away with this so that's pretty cool. And when you are ready to take it off you can simply turn that key, twist this knob and it pops out giving you a nice clean OEM look. Now this does stick out pretty far when it's in place but that's fine because if you're using this that probably means you have accessories loaded in place. So as far as aesthetics wise, it's actually not a bad thing because you can stow your any folding accessories, they're not gonna make contact with your fascia which is really nice. And as far as ground clearance goes, so from the top of the receiver tube opening to the ground you're looking at about 14 and a half inches so that's pretty good.
I don't really worry too much that any of your accessories will make contact on flat driving but as you go up an incline they're gonna want to tilt towards the ground, so just kind of keep that in mind. Now as far as the installation goes this is a fairly tricky one because you have to pull off the rear fascia, the hitch is going to mount up against or behind the bumper beam, so that does require taking off a lot of your. all of your rear fascia. And the problem with that is this car does not allow you to unplug the fascia so you really are kinda left having it hanging off to the side while doing it. But once you have it off, it's not too bad.
There are a few different spots in the interior that you're gonna have to pull out to gain access to the bumper that's mounted up. So I kind of recommend if you are not a very handy person this might not be the one for you or find someone that's a fairly handy person and ask them kindly to help you out with this. And I'm gonna walk you through all the steps. I have some tips and tricks along the way that's gonna help you get it installed. So let's take a look at that. To begin our installation, we're gonna head over to each side of our rear fascia with our hatch open and we're gonna have a T20 torx bit. We're gonna go ahead and remove each of these little plugs here. Now during this whole process I recommend having a nice organized spot to keep all your hardware. It's gonna make re-installation a lot easier. So with this out, we'll go ahead and get the other side as well. Now on our wheel wall liner, we're gonna go all the way to the bottom here and there's a T25 screw. We're gonna go ahead and remove that and that's gonna allow us to peel back our fender liner, which is, it's a flexible material and there's gonna be more screws located behind that. But to get to those this will have to come off first and it's pretty tight here so I would recommend having a small ratchet with a torx bit that you can put on there as far as a driver or something it might be a little bit tricky to get in there. So with that removed, we can't pull out too much. There is a plastic nut that's up here. If you need to, you could remove that. It looks like a 10 millimeter but we should be able to peel this back. And if you need to, a trim panel tool sometimes, a plastic one you can run this along and kind of peel that back. But with a little bit of prying we can w