As always (sigh!), several of the above posts reflect a misunderstanding of the function of a WDH.
The purpose of a WDH is NOT to help you tow. It does nothing to increase the towing ability of your tow vehicle. To say that "I have no problems towing ..." is meaningless.
The purpose of a WDH is to preserve the handling characteristics of your tow vehicle. This is very definitely a safety issue.
Your tow vehicle was designed to operate with a certain amount of weight on the front wheels. If you remove 200 or 300 or 400 pounds of that weight from the front wheels, the handling characteristics will change. The steering geometry changes, and the front tires, now unweighted, have less of a grip on the road. If you are just chugging down a straight piece of road, this doesn't matter. But if you have to make a sudden emergency maneuver, it can matter more than anything else in the world at that moment.
The sole purpose of a WDH is to put that weight back on the front wheels.
Heavy vehicles, like an Expedition, have so much weight on the front wheels that the removal of a couple hundred pounds has very little effect, so no WDH is needed. Long wheelbase vehicles, like a long-bed crew-cab pickup, have so much lever arm (the front wheels are so far from the back wheels) that the hitch load doesn't remove much weight from the front. Again, no DH is required. In both cases, handling won't suffer from lack of a WDH. But lighter shorter vehicles can have a serious problem.
In my opinion, saying "a WDH is too much trouble" is like saying "tightening the lug nuts is too much trouble". It may seem so now - but eventually you may very well kill someone. That is not a risk I care to take - or encourage.
Bill
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