[Mr. Adventure]

I think everyone agrees that a 5000# rating would better than 3500#, and 10,000# would be even better than 8500#. If I was buying a new tow vehicle today, it would have a 5000# rating.

Ratings seem to be 3500 or 5000. Real vehicles don't actually fall into such discrete broad categories. I'm sure many 3500# rated vehicles are marginal for the task, given the way most vehicles are rated by their manufacturers (who tell you to first subtract the TV payload from the tow rating). You'd have to read their owner's manual to know who's who. My Toyota gives me a full 3500# in the GCWR on top of the GVWR, for example, and the 4700# between the GCWR and the empty weight provides enough room for the way I use a TrailManor. We have a few stories of people who have tried a lighter vehicle who have chosen to move up to a bigger TV (particularly in the mountains). But there's also a substantial amount of successful owner experience in this forum which ought to impress those of us who haven't been doing it.

In the old days people mounted trailer hitches with a welder or by drilling holes in frames. Since then, the frames have become lighter and unibody vehicles have become heavier, and these days we're all just using the mounting points the manufacturers gave us in the manner they were intended. There's nothing wrong with a hitch on a properly designed unibody, and there's no place in the any of the load calculations to tell it whether you have a truck frame. I've done Google searches looking for hitch mounting failures on unibody vehicles, and the only thing I ever found was one yo-yo who had made his own off-road conversion on a unibody Jeep vehicle, and then designed his own hitch receiver mountings so that he could use it for "recovery" (not much of that story sounded good to me).

I once had a 29ft TT that I towed with a full sized van. I'm happy to not own either these days, in that this was an extremely difficult vehicle on the road. But the issue wasn't the weight, it was the combo of the high center of gravity and the side sail area. There was a way to drive that vehicle combo safely, but too often it wasn't very easy. I'm pretty sure I'd see any of these 3500# vehicles with my TrailManor as a safety improvement over that rig.

Tow ratings are broad guidelines. You are not automatically safe by following them, and you are not automatically unsafe by not following them.

For example, a large number of us have tongue weights north of 500#. Most Class III hitches have a 500# max tongue weight limit, and most of us drive vehicles that have no available Class IV hitches. The last time we went into this I found places in the Ford and Chevy manuals that said the stock pickup hitches have a max tongue weight of 500# without a WDH. Therefore it's likely that a very large number of us have overloaded hitches, if one chooses to look at the ratings in black and white terms instead of the gray shades I believe to more accurately describe the real world.

Accidents are caused by drivers, not by their vehicles:

- No towing equipment is safe unless it is installed properly, diligently used correctly, and regularly checked by the operator.

- Speed, following distance, and driver care are much more important towing safety factors than deviations from the numbers on the placards.