How to Replace Battery 2007-14 Toyota FJ Cruiser

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser and I'm going to be replacing the battery. It's going to be a very simple job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com, thanks. Okay, so let's talk about what we're going to do real quick. Of course, you want to wear hand protection, very important eye protection. Okay, protect your eyes and your skin. If you get any type of battery acid on you for any reason, you want to make sure you wash it off immediately. You have a nut right here and another nut right here. That holds down this bracket which holds your battery down. Under here is your positive battery terminal and you have a 10 millimeter nut here. This is your negative battery terminal with a 10 millimeter nut here.

Before we go ahead and start removing things, I just wanted to make sure to let you know when you remove the negative battery terminal, which is what we're going to do first, you might lose all of your radio presets. Okay? You might have to reset the security on your stereo depending on what kind of stereo you have. So just keep that stuff in mind. All right, super important. I don't want you getting locked out. I don't want anything bad to happen. Just keep all this in mind. So now that we've got our hand protection on and our eye protection, let's get to work. I'm going to use my 10 millimeter wrench and I'm going to loosen this negative battery terminal. You want to do the negative first and not the positive because if you're doing the positive and you happen to touch it on your wrench or whatever you're using up against something metal at the same time and it grounds out, it's going to arc, spark, could put a little weld and or it could possibly mess up your electrical system inside your vehicle.

So let's just avoid that completely. We'll go right from the ground, the negative. This you can do whatever you want. It doesn't do anything. Okay, so I'm going to turn this to the left. You really don't have to go too far with it usually. Just enough to get it to come free. We'll set this aside so it cannot make any connection with the battery. At this point, your positive terminal is not doing anything. You can connect it if you wanted to. It's not going to do anything. I'm not going to do it because why? I don't need to. Anyway, I'm just going to go like this and remove the positive terminal now. We're safe.

Give it a few cranks. Nice little twist. We'll lift it up. Here we are. It's always good to check your terminals. See if you have any funny colors on there. If you've got blue, or white, or green, or well any color really besides metal color on there, you're going to want to clean these up. It's always a good idea to scuff them up anyway, but if you see something like that, you'd want to clean it up with a battery terminal cleanser. To move along, we have both battery terminals off now. Okay. These are just little insulators. They also help let people know this is the positive side, red. Everybody can think of that, so if you wanted to reuse them, you can reuse them. I'll set those aside. Now we're going to start loosening these up. The way that I like to do this now, I'm going to loosen this one up quite a bit. I'm going to do this one quite a bit.

Here we are. Just stuck on a little hook-y-do there. This is what they look like, okay? Inside the vehicle, there's an area where this connects into and then as you tighten this down, it grips in real tight and the same thing for this one. Once you loosen them up, they drop down out of their slots. You just pull them out, lift this straight up. Okay? Easy peasy. You set that aside. Now when we're handling the battery, like I said, you want to make sure you're wearing hand protection. You don't want to get any acid on your fingers. Yeah, maybe this is a sealed battery. Maybe there's probably nothing on the outside. Do I want to risk it? No.

I'm going to grab the battery and we'll swap it out with the new one. While the battery is out, you can do this when the battery is in it as well if you want, you just take more chances of these touching up against the terminals on the battery. I'm just going to use my brush. You can use whatever you've got for a wire brush as long as it fits in there. Just clean this up a little bit. This is just going to get off any corrosion or debris or whatever might come in between the terminal end and the battery terminal. So make it look as good as you want it to look. The better you can make it look, the better it is for it. Do you need to spend all day? No.

Just to show you when your batteries in. I was talking about the hooks. This hook goes right in here. Okay, this hook right here, it goes right in that one. Just like this. When we loosened it up, just dropped down enough so that I could just pull them out. Easy peasy. So we've got our new battery. I'm just going to put it down in here. We've got this cover on here. We're not going to remove this yet. That's just so when we're putting this down, if the a negative touches the negative, the positive for some reason comes up here, touches up against this, it's not going to do anything. Okay? This is a protector. We'll save that for last. Cool. All right, so we've got that battery in there like that. So now we'll get the second one in there. I'm going to hold it while I snug this up a little bit.

Okay. I'm going to go back over to this side now. It's super important to make sure that when you're tightening this down, you just bring it to the point that the battery can't move around. You don't need to tighten it down to the point where you're seeing your batteries start to crush down. There we are. It's nice and snug, it's not going anywhere. A lot of times on batteries, you'll notice there'll be little stickers that you can pull out so you can remember what date you were replaced it. If it doesn't have one, you can just go ahead and write it on there with whatever you want. If you wanted to, it's your prerogative.

For the purpose of this video, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to take my negative and move it away. Just like that. I'm going to clean up this terminal end with the terminal end brush that I have here. This is just going to take off any protective coating that's on there from shipping and whatnot. Give me a nice, clean and roughed up surface for this to go onto in a minute. Now it's time to take this off. It should slide right up. Okay. Just a protective cover. We're going to clean this the same way as we did the negative. That looks pretty great. We'll go with the assumption you want to put these back on. Red goes to positive, black to negative. We're going to take the positive wire first, connect it on here. Make sure that this is away, bring it down. 10 millimeter, switch to the box end here. Go a little bit more. Nice.

Now we can move over here. When we go to put on the negative wire, you might see a little bit of arcing or sparking. You might even hear an audible noise of course, and it might startle you and that's okay. What we need to do is just go one and done. Just put it on. If it starts to scare you, just go for it anyway, okay? Don't pull it off, try putting it back on, off on, off, on, off, on. Just one time, one and done. There we are. Push that down. Perfect. I'll get this little clip on here. There we are, easy peasy.

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