Tow capacities are plummeting on 2012 cars...

[Dale M.]

Forget specification, forget midget size, forget gas mileage, buy a car to tow with....

Love my 2005 chevy pickup for towing, tows 1500lb car carrier with 1500-3000 pounds loads (legal laden weight of #7000) up hill just fine, and trailer has brakes for down hill... As for gas mileage , I want to get where I'm going not wait for hell to freeze over. I do my once a moth 312 mile run to my racing event on one tank of fuel...... It's always a shock to people ( love to see their faces in my mirrors) with wheeze little cars going up hill (4 lanes) at 38 mph when I pass them with trailer on doing Californians legal limit (55 mph)...

Buy a real tow vehicle for real enjoyment when towing....

Dale

[parnold]

I drive 21000 miles a year back and forth to work. At 30mpg thats 700 gallons of gas. With a V8 that gets at best 20mpg, that's 1050 gallons of gas. All so the four times a year I tow I can pass little cars on hills. NOT

Last year towed a total of 600 miles. This year about 1500. Hard to justify all the extra gas.

[vanwyk4257]

Forget specification, forget midget size, forget gas mileage, buy a car to tow with....

Love my 2005 chevy pickup for towing, tows 1500lb car carrier with 1500-3000 pounds loads (legal laden weight of #7000) up hill just fine, and trailer has brakes for down hill... As for gas mileage , I want to get where I'm going not wait for hell to freeze over. I do my once a moth 312 mile run to my racing event on one tank of fuel...... It's always a shock to people ( love to see their faces in my mirrors) with wheeze little cars going up hill (4 lanes) at 38 mph when I pass them with trailer on doing Californians legal limit (55 mph)...

Buy a real tow vehicle for real enjoyment when towing....

Dale

I hear you Dale, my wife's last vehicle before the Subaru was a 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee. When she wanted one I told her she could pick out whatever she wanted as long as it was a V8, had a towing package and was off-road capable. I once towed a 1994 B4C camaro I bought in indiana back home to Grand Rapids on a roughly 2000lbs car trailer with the cruise set at 70mph and the tow mode engaged. I think I averaged about 10.7mpg on the return trip, but it did just fine.
The Subaru will be a totally different kettle of fish, but I don't tow often enough or heavy enough to need a regular tow vehicle and don't want to pay the penalty at the pump the rest of the time. Besides, my racing days are behind me for a while since we had a daughter a couple years ago and my wife isn't working for now. I had a really nice 87 Porsche 911 that I literally sold the day before my wife went into labor!

[Pete S]

Ok, pickups and V8s are great but who wants to feed one of those things all year long just to pull a little teardrop trailer 8 or 10 trips a season. They are WAY harder to find parking for if you live urban or even suburban. Keeping one around as a dedicated tow vehicle may be fine if you have an extra 20 feet of driveway you want to keep a shadow on. With the TD you need 35 feet of driveway just for that RV equipment. Yeah, I still haven't sold my V8 conversion van that I pulled my 22' sailboat (5000# with the trailer?) and it gets 17 mpg hwy @ 72 mph. Geeze, if I'm taking that what do I need the TD for?

The point of >this particular discussion< is that, for those of us who like our little cars for "all those reasons", our options seem to be going away. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) apparently feel that it is far too unsafe to do what many of us have done safely for a whole lot of years. Now we won't be able to get little cars that are rated to tow. If you like new-little-cars and you also like teardropping, little boats, or anything else that only requires a tiny trailer you are pretty much S_O_L.

Really???

[angib]

Is this anything to do with the newly-introduced SAE standard for measuring towing capacity? I thought that only applied to (pick-up) trucks but maybe it extended to cars as well.

But like almost any vehicle specification item today, it's a marketing decision - a higher tow rating may make the difference to someone's truck purchase, but presumably the manufacturers feel no-one's car buying decision will be affected.

[caseydog]

Here is a workaround plan I had on a previous car. I had a bike rack that worked with my 1-inch receiver, and I put the rack in the trunk if I needed warranty service. They never questioned my receiver, but if they would have, I could have told them it was for my bike rack -- the one in the trunk.

Also, my understanding of the legalities of voiding warranties is that the manufacturer has to show a cause and effect relationship between the offending accessory, and the failure of the car. So, the manufacture can't reject a claim on a burned out power window motor because you have a trailer hitch, for example. There is no way the hitch could have caused the failure.



CD

[Larry C]

After selling my beloved V-6 1992 Chevy pic-up that got a solid 20MPG I was going to buy something that would surely get 35-40 MPG and still pull a Ultralight Tear! Boy... did I get a surprise.
All the higher mpg 4 cyl. cars (except the rare diesels) can't even get out of their own way much less pull a 500# trailer. Looking for new, I tried them all. I have come to the conclusion they are all (4 cyl) totally gutless for towing, and can't even accelerate safely onto a highway. Plus most are not rated for towing at all!!
After much agonizing over what to buy, and even buying a HF trailer to take the place of my recently sold PU, I ended up buying a new 4 cyl. PU (2WD) with a 5 sp manual trans. On my test drive,as soon as I drove out of the dealership I knew this was going to pull my light weigh tear much better than any 4 cyl. car/suv I have tried. I have 2500 miles on it now and my last tank got 24.5MPG with the 10%ethanol I am forced to use. My 21 gal tank will take me about 500 miles!
The MPG's are actually better than I expected, and about the same as most cars capable of towing, however, I know I have a much more capable chassis/brakes than any small car/suv.
I guess I'm a "trucker" and always will be, screw the 40MPG whimpmobile!!


That's the one my wife wants

[parnold]

Caseydog: Good plan on the bike rack. I'll be shopping for one for my car!

Larry: I hear ya on the whimpmobile. My Hyundai was a slug. I don't feel that with the Subaru. The Hyundai was 105 hp, while the Subaru is 170.

[Dale M.]

Caseydog: Good plan on the bike rack. I'll be shopping for one for my car!

Larry: I hear ya on the whimpmobile. My Hyundai was a slug. I don't feel that with the Subaru. The Hyundai was 105 hp, while the Subaru is 170.

A simple "chip" will boost it to 200+....

Dale

[Larry C]

The other thing that people should bear in mind when comparing US-spec models to euro or other overseas models is that in all likelihood a model sold here that has zero tow rating will not likely have a transmission cooler etcetera that an overseas model might be equipped with.

I'm going to see how my 2010 forester does with my trailer, but I'm already researching the possibility of adding an additional auxiliary trans cooler and temp gauge to better be able to monitor it.

I'm also having a class III hitch installed shortly that exceeds the towing capacity on the vehicle. I'm not going to exceed the tow rating on the vehicle with anything I would pull, but I like overkill when it comes to stuff like this. My trailer should come in around 1450-1500 lbs if I did my estimating correctly.

Wow... Your going to pull a 1500# trailer with Forester?? Do you have the one with the turbo? The one I drove (2011) didn't have enough power to climb a small hill with 2 passengers in it. I had my heart and cash set on a new Forester, but the lack of power turned me off instantly. Good luck with yours as a TV. Maybe the 2010 has different gear ratios than the 2011.

Larry C

[Larry C]

As Bobby Dylan kept telling us: "The Times They Are A Changin'"

OK, there comes a time when people decide to go get that new car. When the warranty runs out, when the seats don't smell new anymore, or some similar thing. Now if you like towing little trailers with LITTLE cars you could be in for a shock if you are looking at the 2012 cars.

I have an old Toyota that I believe is rated for 1500# towing. The new model is rated for, get this, ZERO ZIP NADA. We also have a Ford Focus that we tow our teardrop with. I believe that one is also rated for 1500# but Ford says NO Towing with the new model. They also say No Towing with the Fusion at all.

If you want to tow with a new Ford, without risking breaking any laws or nullifying your warranty, you have to move up to a Taurus or Edge. This holds true no matter how tiny your trailer is! Ok, I used Ford and Toyota as examples but apparently all the manufacturers have put the nix on towing with their small cars.

I called Ford and after I finally pinned them down they came out and said that a hitch would violate the warranty (even though it isn't mentioned in the warranty book). I said "so what you are saying is if all I want to haul is my 130# sailboat on a 120# trailer in your product line I have to buy your biggest car or a CUV?" "Isn't that like buying a semi-tractor to haul a Scamp???" I'm sorry sir but...

I think the Camry is still rated for 1000#. The sad thing is that I'm not sure our TD is under 1000# when it is loaded.

This sucks!!!

I think Slow Cowboy has hit it. The MPG requirements are rapidly approaching. All the car companies are redesigning everything to get more efficiency for engines, lightening the vehicles, and using aerodynamics.
However, this is a work in progress that requires lots of testing and retooling.
In the mean time, a simple MPG increase comes from tweaking transmission and final drive gear ratios. Honda did this for 2011.
The result was the Accord got a 1-2 MPG boost to compete with Camry and Altima in this popular segment. I drove a 2011 Accord in search for a suitable TV, and found it totally gutless compared to a 2008 model a friend has.

Many of you have older versions of current models and find them adequate
for towing, but have you driven the new model lately? I suspect the pursuit of high MPG's to meet requirements, by changing gear ratios has a lot to do with the manufacturers saying you can't tow. I see this trend continuing.

Larry C

[Shadow Catcher]

We have a 01 Subaru outback with a 3 L H6 engine that puts out better than 220 hp unmodified. When setting things up for towing I got the biggest transmission cooler I could stuff in and switch to synthetic transmission fluid.

One thing to remember with the European car towing standards is that they include breaks of some sort on the trailer, one of the EU folks will probably if I am wrong but a lot of what I have seen has been surge brakes.

We have two Subaru Outback's for one main reason, we live in northwestern Ohio and it was planed off flat by the last set of glaciers and on top of that we average 15 mile an hour winds. What this means in wintertime is that we end up with snow drifts downwind of a very fencepost and telephone pole. Where we are used to be edge of the Great Black Swamp and to drain it there are still 10 foot deep ditches.

The diesel Subaru's in Europe supposedly get someplace in the 50 miles per gallon territory but they are supposedly not clean enough for USA standards. At the Detroit auto show were Subaru's using the CVT and in years past they have shown hybrid technology work which is in reality a stopgap for fuel-cell technology.

There is also a recent work in batteries that approach liquid fuels for energy density.

[Mojave Bob]

Unfortunately for us, we who want to use a car to tow a trailer are a tiny, tiny segment of the car-buying population. Only a few percent of vehicles sold will ever tow, and of those that do, the vast majority will be trucks or SUVs. So, the tow-with-a-car gang is too small to have any voice or clout with the car companies.

Then add the increased fuel-economy pressure, and you get smaller, lighter cars with lighter-weight but more precise and complex transmission components, plus lighter suspension, frame and brake components (appropriate for a lighter vehicle), and you end up with zippo for tow capacity. They just arent designing a lot of excess capacity into cars today.

I'm not sure where this will ultimately take us. I, for one, do not want to keep a "fuel-hog" vehicle around for my occasional towing. Both cars get driven 25-30 miles for work daily, and I want good economy. I also want enough capacity to occasionally tow safely. That may be a problem in the future. Even my 700# LittleGuy may be too much.

My 1995 Honda Civic returned 58.75 mpg on the last tank (60-65 mph interstate run with A/C on). I think I could have hit 60mpg if I hadn't gotten stuck in a construction tie-up for most of an hour. Too bad I can't tow with that!

[Pete S]

Is this anything to do with the newly-introduced SAE standard for measuring towing capacity? I thought that only applied to (pick-up) trucks but maybe it extended to cars as well.

But like almost any vehicle specification item today, it's a marketing decision - a higher tow rating may make the difference to someone's truck purchase, but presumably the manufacturers feel no-one's car buying decision will be affected.

I'm guessing the SAE put the ka-bosh on towing with new 2012 cars indirectly. They came out with the truck version and auto manufacturers have applied it to their cars. Maybe they knew all along it would get applied like this. Guess who the members of the Society of Automotive Engineers work for...

Larry: Gutless to one person may be exactly what they need for someone else. If someone gets older and can't get their super-lightweight canoe to the roof anymore and they choose to put it on an aluminum trailer they only need to tow about 100#. People tow that load with bicycles, what car would not be capable of that? There will be a great difference between the needs of someone who only tows in the flats of mid america and those who have mountains to deal with.

My personal peeve about this is that I downsized all my gear so I wouldn't have to drive a big tow vehicle anymore. The small camper, boats, utility trailer... Up comes this arbitrary marketing decision and all of the sudden they are messin' with my plan. I bet I'm not alone...

[Larry C]

[/quote]
Larry: Gutless to one person may be exactly what they need for someone else. If someone gets older and can't get their super-lightweight canoe to the roof anymore and they choose to put it on an aluminum trailer they only need to tow about 100#. People tow that load with bicycles, what car would not be capable of that? There will be a great difference between the needs of someone who only tows in the flats of mid america and those who have mountains to deal with.
[/quote]

Pete,
I should be more specific about "gutless" I am referring to the current crop of 4 cyl. cars and SUV's Very few have enough reserve power to safely accelerate onto a highway on ramp. I am not a lead foot and haven't owned a V8 anything in 30 years. I have mostly had 4 cyl cars/trucks, but they all had what I refer to as driveability. If they were Auto trans, they didn't shift into final gear and fall into a lugging situation having to downshift for the slightest grade.
The current crop (2011/2012) of guttless cars may be adequate for tooling around town, but load them up with 4 people and luggage, forget it!! You could probably pull a light utility trailer, but a 500-1500# typical would be difficult.
In 1985 I bought a Toyota Tercel with a 1.5L engine. I would frequently take backpacking trips where I would drive 1000 miles or more with 4 people and 4 full packs, get 42MPG, and pull all hills the mountains could throw at us.
Today's cars, with engines almost twice the size would be hard pressed to carry the same load without struggling. I kept the Tercel for 19.5 years.

Larry