DIY DIY: How to Add Power Door Locks

plu · Oct 24, 2009

DIY: How to Add Power Door Locks

Basically, to add power locks to your Corolla, you will need to replace your manual door locks with the OEM power locks with built-in actuators or you can buy add-on actuators from an aftermarket company that makes them for car alarms.

Here is an idea of how the rear aftermarket actuators can be installed for the rear doors:

And for the front:

After installing the power door locks, all you will need is to have an car alarm with keyless entry installed or do a conversion to rewire for OEM power locks. If you are wiring this into a car alarm, just run your wires from each door together into one central location and then wire it into the lock/unlock port of your car alarm.

But for this DIY we will be working on installing the OEM power door locks.

Installing Power Locks for the Front Doors
1) Take off interior door panels. Start by take off the screws circled in red in the interior door handle and screws under the arm rest.

2) Take off the window crank with a plier. Pull the door panel off while carefully unhooking the tab that holds the metal link that connects the interior door handle to the door lock. The interior door handle should come off.

3) Unbolt the 3 screws on the inside of the door.

4) Take off the bolt that holds the window rain gutter to the door. You want to do this so you have enough room to wiggle out the door lock.

5) Then unbolt the two bolts in red. The key lock cylinder will fall off.

6) Swap the key lock cylinder from the old door lock to the new one.

7) Take off the metal link secured by the white tab to unlink the door lock from the exterior door handle.

8) Take off the old door lock and replace with this one that has the built-in actuator.

9) Bolt in the new door lock the same way you took the old lock off but you need an extra bolt circled here to secure the actuator.

10) Optionally, you can replace your door's wire harness by swapping with one from a car with power windows/locks/mirrors. This will make future power conversions easier.

11) The wire harness comes through this hole and goes down to reconnect with the interior wire harness in the white plastic tray. You will need to solder or splice the interior harness with the new harness as this harness has wires for power windows and mirrors in addition to the power lock. The wires you want to splice is the blue and red wires for the lock/unlock wires.

Installing Power Locks for the Rear Doors
1) First, take off the interior door panels. This process is similar to the process for the front doors.
The actuators for rear doors compared from one with and without actuators look like this:

2) Take off the 3 screws on the inside of the door.

3) Disconnect this tab as it connects the door lock to the latch.

4) Pull off the interior door handle by disconnecting the plastic tab to release the metal lock here.

5) Now comes the hard part of taking out the door lock from the exterior door handle. Wiggle the white plastic piece here along with pulling and releasing the exterior door handle to free the door lock assembly out. This part takes a lot of patience.

6) Splice the red wire and the blue wire with the lock/unlock wires from the car alarm or factory harness. You really can't harm anything even if you get the red wire and blue wires crossed as it would just do the opposite action of what you wanted (unlocking the door when you press the lock button and vise versa).

7) Reconnect the door lock with built-in actuators like the way you took off the old door locks. Remember to add an extra bolt to secure the actuator to the door shown here.