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Old 05-22-2006, 11:04 AM   #11
CA_flyfisher
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Default Update to towing an Xterra

Now I can say I have some towing experience with an Xterra. I towed from Eugene Oregon to L.A. CA about 16 hours through rain, wind, thunderstoms, mountains and flats. I set my Xterra up with a trans cooler, prodigy brake controller, and a WD hitch. First of all you can tell there is something back there. You'd have to have a pretty big TV to not feel it. But the good news is I really had no sway problems even in high wind doing 60 MPH. Acceleration is of course slower, but you do get up to speed in a reasonable amount of time. Don't expect to get to 55-60 by the time you hit the end of a short to medium length on ramp. We had quite a bit of wind and rain on the way back, but the trailer held steady. It will fight back a little bit over a rolling bump. You can feel the reverberation as it corrects itself and levels back out. Nothing major though. I may also need to do a little fine tuning on the WD hitch. My wife, who has no towing experience, well wait a second neither do I, decided she needed some. As soon as she took over we got into some very heavy rain with no way off the highway and no shoulder big enough to pull off onto. It was quite nerve racking, but again the trailer and TV handled well. In fact, I had to tell her to back it down a little bit because I thought she was going too fast for the conditions. Now for the bad but not too bad news. We did hit some long steep grades. Our Xterra is a V6 automatic, and when we hit the type of grade where semi trucks are doing 25 to 45, we could manage 40 to 55. I would definitely recommend the trans cooler. The Xterra would sometimes struggle between 3rd and 4th gear(it would really wind out in third gear before the shift to 4th) but again this was on pretty steep climbs. I don't beleive we were ever higher than 4500 ft., so it would of course be worse in thinner air. Braking was very good though. My wife was getting off into a rest area that had a short off ramp that turned hard to the right. It was wet and she wasn't slowing down fast enough for the turn. I quickly alerted her(yelled at her to slow down) and she braked pretty hard into the turn on wet pavement but the tires held the road. Granted this was an unloaded 2720 with all the options and nothing in the tanks, but I did have a bunch of stuff in the TV along with 2 passengers. Overall, I was pretty happy with my rig and its performance.
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