What Can You ACTUALLY Tow? Payload -Tow Capacity - Travel Trailer

Hi youtube, my name is ian and this is my big rock media channel, so as someone who has owned a few different motorhomes, a few different trucks and has made a lot of pretty popular youtube videos on motorhomes, the question you ask me and the question What I see the most out there is

what

can I safely tow with my truck or SUV or do I want to buy a

trailer

. Can I tow this and can I safely transport it with my vehicle? So today I'm going to break it down in the simplest terms I can, this is really a crash course on towing

capacity

,

payload

hitch ratings, sway control and everything you need to know to tow safely, so let me know if this sounds familiar, you visited an RV dealership and you came with

what

ever your toyota highlander your chevy colorado or whatever car you have and you said to the salesman oh what

trailer

s can I tow and they showed you this whole big aisle of trailers that looked huge and heavy and told you oh yeah, you'll be okay to tow this or let's say maybe you showed up with an F-150 and you know you saw the ad that says it has an 11 thousand pound towing

capacity

.

Does that mean you can tow an eleven thousand pound toy truck? Well, the dealership probably will. I'm telling you yes because guess what they're commission based and they only want to sell you trailers but today I'm going to tell you the truth about how to understand this and the truth is you probably can't tow a

travel

trailer that's at its maximum total capacity. of your vehicle, well before we begin, there is some homework and some terminology that we need to review, so you will need to know this information for each of these data points, so let me explain what they mean, so first thing is Gross vehicle weight rating gvwr - this is the maximum amount your vehicle can weigh with all its load and including the weight of your trailer hitch, so you need to know your gvwr gcwr Gross combination weight rating - this is the amount total of your trailer. and the vehicle can weigh everything together with all its cargo and everything loaded or instead you can get the towing capacity of your specific vehicle, it is the same so this is how you do this if you take the gcwr minus the gvwr of your vehicle, which is This will be your tow rating, which makes sense because your car's gross vehicle weight rating plus the car's towing capacity will be your combined gross weight rating for your truck and your trailer.

You need to know the

payload

of your vehicle. so you can find the payload in the door frame of your vehicle, let me show you. Well, on my f-150 and that's how all modern vehicles are, you're going to go into the driver's side door jamb and you're going to look for this yellow label over the tire and charging information here, you'll find where it says That the combined weight of occupants and cargo should never exceed 1496 pounds, that is its payload capacity and that is very important to understanding the payload of an F-150. or Highlander or any vehicle that is not the same across the board, what I mean is that depending on what options your vehicle has in the various ways it is configured, the payload can vary dramatically, for example in the F-150, Ford will announce something like oh the f-150, best in class payload, 3000 pounds.

Well, as I just showed you, my truck weighs only 1496 pounds, that's half of what they advertise. The reason for this is that the vehicles have different options installed that make it heavier and also reduce its payload. there are different setups think about all axle ratios transmissions engine options cab lengths bed lengths now I'm talking about pickup trucks but this applies to any vehicle so you need to know the exact payload for your exact vehicle so look in your door frame and write down Another thing you need to know for these calculations is the estimated weight of all your passengers and cargo.

What I mean is that when you are ready to go on your camping trip, calculate the weight of your passengers and all your camping gear. You will need this to be the load that you will put on the truck and we will add this to the weight of your trailer hitch to know if you have excess payload or not, so that is important. I need to know the gross vehicle weight of your trailer, so the gvwr is the same as I mentioned above with the gpw of your car, it's how much you can expect fully loaded.

Same for your trailer. Your trailer also has a gross vehicle weight which is how much that trailer is safely allowed to weigh at most for the trailer to be a dry weight, which is a whole different topic because dry weights are a little misleading, but what really What you want to see is the GVWR, which is how much your trailer can legally weigh if you load it with everything you need, so this is a topic for another video, but you need to make sure you don't overload your trailer properly so that the GVWR is the weight. maximum allowable of your trailer there.

There are cases where people overload their trailer, so to calculate that you basically have to look at the dry weight of the trailer, there will also be a sticker on the inside of the trailer door that says what it weighs with all of its options installed. factory and complete. propane tanks, so you'll take that weight plus the estimated weight of whatever cargo you're carrying on the trailer and also, if you're filling the tank with fresh water, how much it weighs, add it all up and make sure it's under the gvwr of your trailer another data point you need to know is the weight of your trailer hitch some people call it a pinway you know the hitch weight its basically the weight that presses the hitch into your vehicle you can find this in Your Trailer Specs , if you can't find them in the documentation that comes with your trailer, most RV manufacturers have them online and some type of data table you can download.

You also need to know what type of hitch you have. The hooks are of any kind. one two three four or five depending on the weight rating and we're going to get into that and finally, if you're using a weight distribution hitch, you need to know the specifications of it, but we're going to talk about the situations why or why what not, you may need a weight distribution hitch, so hitches get a little confusing because you have the receiver, which is the part of your truck that the hitch goes into, which will have a certain weight rating and you.

We also have the hitch itself and, of course, the ball. Now, without getting too caught up in all of this, you just want to look at the weights of all of them and make sure they make sense for your truck and trailer. They match each other so this hitch has a 6000 pound weight rating and is a 600 pound weight distribution hitch with a 600 pound tongue weight which matches my towbar trailer perfectly but depending on your trailer will be different, but the basic point is that you need to know what the receiver rating is on your vehicle's hitch and if it can support the weight of your trailer and then also what the hitch is rated for and what your ball is rated for. on my ball, it says 6,000 pounds right here on the ball now, if you have something in the equation that's less than everything else, then that's going to be your limiting factor so you know, even if my hitch let's say this was a hitch of 10,000 pounds and Let's say my receiver weighs like 12,000 pounds, which I think is because this truck has a max tow package, but anyway if I have a 6,000 pound ball, which is determined by the size of the ball axle, so that's going to be my limiting factor if that's my lowest point, so for my setup it shouldn't exceed 6000 pounds unless I change this ball, so I want to get back to the towing capacity for a second, as I mentioned, manufacturers are in this sucker war of trying to claim the most towing capacity, so there are a few things to keep in mind: number one is mostly marketing.

Number two, the truck you

actually

buy, like my truck for example, will not have anywhere near the towing capacity they advertise in the commercials. Because the trucks they advertise or the SUVs they advertise with those tow ratings are very specific packages, it could be a completely gutted model with an unoptioned long bed with additional towing equipment that no one orders, in other words, probably your vehicle It's not set up that way and therefore doesn't have as high of a tow rating, so the test that the manufacturers do is called something called j2807, so basically j2807 sets criteria for the manufacturers to vehicle.

Must be able to tow a certain amount. of weight goes up a certain percentage at a certain rate without overheating or breaking, it also reaches a certain temperature and there are other criteria that they look at, but again, this is not a controlled environment, but it is an environment that you are not entering. When you're towing your

travel

trailer towing a load of bricks up a hill in Arizona with a perfectly equipped truck, that's not the situation you're in so you can't go by that weight rating and that's why I'm doing This video so you can understand exactly what you can

actually

tow or haul with your truck or SUV, so we'll use my setup as an example.

Using my truck as an example, I showed them that the payload is fifteen hundred pounds. Now let's say I have a ten thousand pound trailer, in fact the manual says that this truck can tow about twelve thousand pounds depending on how it's configured, but what we're going to show now is that in reality it most likely can't. can because we're going to overload the payload and here's why, let's say we have our ten thousand pound trailer, let's say it has a fifteen percent tongue weight, which means that fifteen percent of the weight of the trailer pushes towards down the tongue of the trailer where it interacts with your hitch. on the high end, but it could be between 10 and 20 percent, it varies a lot, but let's say it's a 15 for this trailer, so now it's 1500 pounds, so we can already see that we have a problem, we have already maximized the payload. of my truck and that's before I get in the seat, before I put the load in the bed, before I put my wife and my son in it or any type of camping equipment, so basically I'm already on my own, I can't tow that trailer because I can't load anything on the truck.

I am already at my maximum payload capacity with zero items in the truck as its passengers are just hitched and that is why payload is important and that is why it will far exceed its payload capacity. before you exceed your towing capacity, so in the real world I'll let you know 300 pounds of passengers, let's say I have another 300 pounds of camping gear, which is 600 pounds right there, so 1,500 pounds, which is my capacity of total payload. Minus that 600 leaves me only 900 pounds for trailer tongue weight. Now if you had a trailer that was 10 tons, you could make a 9,000 pound trailer, assuming it was 10, it would be 900 pounds, but if you had a trailer. weighing 15 tons, which is more like what my lance has, that means I'll be limited to a 6,000 pound trailer because 15 out of 6,000 is 900 pounds okay, so here's a real world example of what I'm talking about. payload and how it's so easy to get close to your payload even with the trailer weighing only half the weight rating of your tow vehicle, so as I mentioned my tow vehicle has a tow weight rating of something like that like 12,000 pounds my trailer is gross vehicle weight.

Rated 5,500 lbs. It's pretty light right now. I don't have fresh water, so it could weigh around 5,000 pounds. As for hitch weight, if you estimate 10 to 15 percent, I'm probably somewhere between five and five. 500 and 700 pound hitch weight, hitch weights are always a little heavier in reality than I think the manufacturers say so you can see how I'm using a weight distribution hitch to push some of this weight towards the axles of the trailer and also back to the front axle of the truck, now don't pay too much attention because this is a bit malicious with the uneven terrain here, so it seems like my suspension is going crazy, but don't worry about it if you look in the load that I have, so I have a motorcycle that weighs about um, you know, probably close to 300 pounds with luggage and four gallons of gas.

I have, you know, baby strollers, I have ramps and over here. If you look, I have a generator that weighs quite a bit, like 70 pounds, I have fuel tanks with propane bottles and then we are going to have things inside the truck that will add weight to the load, the passengers brought my wife and my son, so we'll probably say that, let's say the hitch, the weight is only 600 pounds and let's say I get along, I have a 300 pound motorcycle, so that's 900 pounds, I have another hundred pounds for campinghere, that's a thousand. pounds, three hundred pounds of passengers, so I'm up to thirteen hundred pounds and my payload is only fifteen hundred, so I'm two hundred pounds away from overloading this f-150 with a max tow package and a three-five ecoboost with the little five thousand pound trailer, so think about that, if you have a big trailer and a lot of equipment and a big family, you're probably overloading your half ton truck, I'm just telling you that as a fact, so anyway Let's continue with the video.

Now you might be saying, well, why does it matter if I have too much payload? You know my truck can handle it or I've towed bigger trailers than that with my Chevy Colorado or my, you know, whatever vehicle and it was fine and my friend Joe did this right. There are a couple of reasons why you don't want to exceed its capacity. of payload, even if you think your vehicle can handle it. Number one is liability if, God forbid, you have some kind of accident with your rig and someone gets hurt or there is some kind of property damage, good luck in any kind of lawsuit, if it is discovered that you had overloaded your vehicle, it passes the legal limits, the other thing is just general safety, so even if you don't get into an accident, you know you want it. to feel confident and sure that your family is fine going up and down mountain passes and things like that with your trailer and you just don't want to stress your vehicle too much, so there are many reasons why you don't want to overload the legal limits of your truck , car, off road, so you really need to pay attention to this payload and make sure you don't go over the gvwr, so there are a couple more check points you need to make sure that's okay with your vehicle.

You will have a gross axle weight rating or gawr. Now this is harder to weigh because you will have to go to a truck scale to find out how much weight is on your individual axle, but sometimes you may reach your axle weight rating sooner. You reach the maximum payload of your truck, which further adds to the complication of this, but I would say that for most people, if you make sure you stick to your payload limits, you probably won't have too many problems with your axle. rough. weight rating, but it's something to keep in mind that it's another rating it's supposed to be in.

Next on the checklist is your truck's tires, so tires actually have a load range and you'll see like load range c d and They are common, I'm not going to go into this in depth, but you need to know what those are. weight ratings and make sure that is not a limiting factor for you, so if you have load range c tires on your truck that is not that heavy and you have the maximum payload, you may be reaching the maximum weight of your tires for that axle before you reach your payload, so that's another thing to consider, but I would say that on average you will probably run into that payload problem before you start overloading the rated weight of your tires.

Well, let's briefly talk about trailer safety and specifically trailer sway. Trailer sway is a common problem, it is extremely dangerous and if you have ever been through it, it is One of the scariest things you can experience when driving a vehicle and towing it, there are a couple of things that contribute to a trailer sways. The most common is weight that is not properly balanced front to back on the trailer, so trailer stability is very important. Shocked by how much weight the front of the trailer has more weight on the trailer tongue than the rear. Many of you have seen the video that the model uses.

I'll try to put a clip of that. here where they move the weight to the rear of the trailer model and the trailer won't correct the sway, but if they move that way to the front of the trailer the trailer will have a little bit of sway and then it will stop and correct itself . This is incredibly important to understand and this is why trailers are not fully balanced front to back, they are going to have more weight in the front which contributes to the payload problem you often have with your vehicle because you have all that weight pushes down on the hitch, but it also provides a more stable towing experience and minimizes that sway Now, that's not to say that even if you have that proper 10 to 15 percent tongue weight you can't have sway, it still can have a very bad influence, other things that contribute to it would be a poorly loaded configuration on any part of your truck trailer, underinflated tires, strong crosswinds, you know, passing trucks or simply having a very long trailer with a lot of lateral area being impacted by the wind and a small tow vehicle, the wheelbase of your vehicle affects stability so there are many factors so my advice for mitigating any type of sway is a couple of things number one: make sure you are within all the limits for your truck and your trailer everything we talk about in this video make sure all the tires on your truck and trailer are inflated correctly make sure you don't have an oversized trailer For the truck or tow vehicle you are using make sure that when you load your trailer you focus the extra excess weight you are carrying towards the front of the trailer, there is a reason why the propane tanks and batteries are at the front of the trailer. the trailers or not in the back, so there are other things.

What you can do to help control the sway Once you've taken care of the basics, you can use a sway control bar or a hitch, a weight distribution hitch like the one I have built into the house sway control, so I'll put photos of this here. but suede control bars use a friction system to help prevent sway, it gives you an extra thing to engage and I don't like them, so what I use is a hitch, a weight distribution hitch that has control Built-in sway due to friction. on the metal barbell bars by pressing down here, okay, so how do you know if you need a weight distribution hitch?

Well, there are a few ways to tell. It's not an exact science, so weight distribution hitches are simply used to transfer some weight off the tongue. Remove the trailer from the hitch to the front axle of your tow vehicle and also back to the axle or axles of the trailer. This is useful for several reasons, one of which can help reduce squat and stress on your vehicle's bumper. You can improve the handling and ride of your vehicle because you are shifting some of that weight from the rear to the front and balancing that weight, you are increasing your steering response and your steering feel and safety, you have also probably learned that Now this actually reduces the payload issue a bit because it transfers some of the weight to the trailer axles.

Now I don't include it in the calculation because I thought I was on the safe side and assuming that maybe you don't do it. Don't use one of these weight distribution hitches you need to calculate the total tongue weight of the trailer when calculating your payload, but yes, technically, if you use a weight distribution hitch, you are taking a little weight off, but it's not like that. a lot, so again, I wouldn't really take it into account, but how do you really know that you need a weight distribution hitch? If you notice that your tow vehicle is really sagging when you attach the trailer, then you probably need one if you're getting close to the maximum payload or maximum tow rating or even within, I would say, about 60 percent of either of those figures. , you'll probably want to consider a weight distribution hitch.

I almost always stick with the weight distribution hitch, even if I'm hesitant about needing it because it helps control sway. I prefer how it helps restore my truck's handling and just gives a more balanced feel overall. Now the downside is that it's a little more work to connect, disconnect and join, but you know. I get used to it and it's not that hard at the end of the day. It's very alarming to me how many rigs I see that are clearly overloaded and are usually overloading their truck or SUV in terms of payload long before they reach that number. maximum tow rating, so even with this modest spear trailer, which is a 21 foot trailer, it has a gross weight of 5500 pounds, which is less than half the tow rating of my f-150 with the max tow package and the ecoboost 3.5, so you might think.

Well I have this really awesome truck, it can tow 12,000 pounds, but actually with this trailer with the tongue weight that it has and when I put my cargo and my passengers in my truck I have very little weight capacity left. In terms of my truck's payload, I can barely fit a non-overweight light motorcycle into my truck's payload and the best advice I can give you is not to offend salespeople or dealers, but don't trust what the dealer tells you. car dealership. and don't trust what the RV dealer tells you because their job is to move units and earn their commission, not to ensure your safety.

You don't know all the factors that go into it that we've covered in this video, so don't do it. Don't listen to them do their own homework, knowledge is power with all that said. I hope to see you at the campgrounds, not on the road. I wish you all a safe RV experience. If this video was helpful, give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel for more rb content and see you there.