Quote:
Originally Posted by Royal Tiger
My buddy who taught me to tow when I had my Tundra used to say, religiously, never tow more than HALF the listed rating, so in my case 3700lbs.
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Thats probably a bit extreme. Safe for sure, and its always better to be safe than sorry. But the rule of thumb that I've always heard was 85% and go lower from there: depending on aerodynamics, speed, distance, and hilliness.
For example, if you have a single horse trailer (fairly aerodynamic, as far as trailers go) that you use to haul your animal around on back roads (low speeds) in your local area (short distance) thats reasonably flat, it won't be an issue at all.
On the other hand, if you have an open trailer with some proverbial brick on it, or just a lot of random stuff like if you were moving or something, it can be like dragging a parachute behind you. And the faster you go, the harder it gets. Hills alternate between working your engine & working your brakes. And the farther you're going, the less you want to burden your truck.
As an example of what
NOT to do ... about 10 years ago our mini-baja team used a Rav4 to go nearly 1000 miles (one way) with an open trailer (loaded with our tube framed baja buggy & most of our gear) on highways, on our way to the hills of Tennessee. Even stopping ever hour or so to let things cool down, it probably cut years off the life of that engine and/or transmission. We would have used a bigger vehicle, but none of us had one that we could take to the states for several days. It was very dumb, and was made worse by the fact that we were sleep deprived and only one of us had any experience driving with a trailer. We made it without any major incident, thankfully, but it could easily have gone much worse. I don't think any of us will ever do anything like that again.