Quote:
Originally Posted by harveyrv
Not sure how that can be interpreted as a "Guideline".
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I'm not sure how something that's based heavily on competitiveness and market share could ever be interpreted as anything but a guideline based primarily on maximizing the market and minimizing the costs and liabilities. There would be room only for only a sidelong glance at the engineering issues in that scenario.
I actually find the variables in towing to be humbling, with a lot of unknowns that make any real precision difficult. Folks who buy a big tow vehicle and think that's all it takes to solve all their towing safety problems are mistaken. If the most important thing is safety, then the most important part of towing is being able to stop before you reach the scene of the accident. Therefore the single, most important factor in towing safety is speed.
At 60mph according to the studies I've been reading and posting on the forum lately, your stopping distance would go up or down by about 4% for every mph plus or minus (it's not actually linear, it gets worse the faster you go). The difference in safety between the best tow vehicle we know about in this forum and the worst could be less than 20mph. In the middle of the range, operating a vehicle basically as it was designed and for the purposes as intended, it's going to be more about the care and caution of how you drive than it is about what you drive.
There are a lot of factors to be considered in choosing a tow vehicle, and you need to let other people make decisions that might be different from yours.