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

hi youtube my name is ian and this is my channel big rock media so as someone who's owned a few different travel trailers a few different trucks and who's done a lot of pretty popular youtube videos on travel trailers the question that i get asked and the question that i see out there the most is what can i safely tow with my truck car or suv or i want to buy x trailer can i tow this and can i haul this with my vehicle safely so today i'm going to break this down in the most simple terms that i can so really this is a crash course on tow capacity payload hitch ratings sway control and everything you need to know to tow safely okay so let me know if this sounds familiar you visited an rv dealership and you came in with whatever it was your toyota highlander your chevy colorado or whatever car you have and you said to the salesman oh what trailers can i tow and they showed you this whole big aisle of trailers that seemed huge and heavy and they said oh yeah you'll be fine towing this or let's say maybe you drove in with an f-150 and you know you saw the ad saying that it has an 11 thousand pound tow capacity does that mean you can tow an eleven thousand pound toy hauler well the dealership is probably gonna tell you yes because guess what they're commission based and they just wanna sell you trailers but today i'm gonna tell you the truth about how to understand this and the truth is you probably cannot tow a travel trailer that's at the maximum total capacity of your vehicle okay now before we get started there's some homework and some terminology that we need to go through so you're going to need to know this information for each of these data points so let me explain what they mean so the first thing is gross vehicle weight rating gvwr this is the maximum amount that your vehicle is allowed to weigh with all of its cargo and including the hitch weight of your trailer so you need to get know your gvwr gcwr gross combined weight rating this is how much total your trailer and vehicle can weigh all together with all your cargo and everything loaded or instead of that you can get your towing capacity of your specific vehicle it's one and the same so here's how you do this if you take the gcwr minus the gvwr of your vehicle that's going to be your tow rating which makes sense right because the gross vehicle weight rating of your car plus the tow capacity of the car is going to be your gross combined 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 jam of your vehicle let me show you okay so on my f-150 and this is how all modern vehicles are you're going to go inside the driver's side door jamb and you're going to look for this yellow sticker tire and loading information here you're going to find where it says the combined weight of occupants and cargo should never exceed 1496 pounds that's your payload capacity right there and that's very important to understand the payload for an f-150 or highlander or whatever vehicle is not the same across the board what i mean is that depending on the options that your vehicle has in the various ways it's configured the payload can vary dramatically for instance on the f-150 ford will advertise something like oh the f-150 best-in-class payload 3000 pounds well as i just showed you my truck is only 1496 pounds that's half of what they're advertising the reason for this is vehicles have different options installed which make it heavier and reduce your payload also there's different configurations think about all the axle ratios transmissions engine choices cab lengths bed lengths now i'm talking about pickup trucks but this applies to any vehicles so you need to know the exact payload for your exact vehicle so look in your door jam and write that down another thing you need to know for these calculations is an estimated weight of all your passengers and cargo so what i mean is that when you're ready to go on your camping trip estimate the weight of your passengers and all your camping gear that you're going to have this is going to be the cargo you're putting in the truck and we're going to add this to the hitch weight of your trailer to know if you're over payload or not so that's important thing you need to know the gross vehicle weight rating of your trailer so the gvwr is the same thing i mentioned earlier with the gpw of your car is how much that can wait fully loaded same thing for your trailer your trailer also has a gross vehicle weight rating which is how much that trailer is allowed to weigh safely as its maximum so the trailer will have a dry weight which is a whole other topic because dry weights are kind of misleading but what you really want to look at is the gvwr which is how much that trailer can weigh legally if you load it up with everything you need so this is kind of a topic for another video but you want to make sure that you're not overloading your trailer right so the gvwr is the maximum permissible weight of your trailer there are instances where people overload their trailer so to calculate that you would basically look at the dry weight of the trailer there's also going to be a sticker on the inside the door the trailer that says what it weighs with all of its factory installed options and full propane tanks so you're going to take that weight plus the estimated weight of whatever cargo you're loading into the trailer and also if you're filling up the fresh water tank how much that weighs add that all together and make sure that's under the gvwr of your trailer another data point that you need to know is the hitch weight of your trailer some people call it the pinway you know the hitch weight it basically is the weight that's pressing down on the hitch onto your vehicle you can find this in your trailer specifications if you can't find it in the the paperwork that came with your trailer most rv manufacturers have this listed online and some sort of data table you can download you also need to know what type of hitch you have hitches are either class 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 that but we're going to talk about the situations why or why not you might need a weight distribution hitch all right so hitches get a little bit confusing because you've got the receiver which is the part of your truck where the hitch goes into which is going to have a certain weight rating and you've also got the hitch itself and of course the ball now without getting too caught up in all this you just want to kind of look at the weights of all those and make sure that they're making sense for your truck and your trailer and they're matching to each other so this hitch has a weight rating of 6000 pounds and it's a 600 pound uh weight distribution hitch 600 pound tongue weight which is perfectly a match for my lance trailer but depending on your trailer it's going to be different but the basic point is you need to know what is the receiver rating on the hitch of your vehicle and can it handle the weight of your trailer and then also your hitch itself what is it rated for and what is your ball rated for on my ball it says 6 000 pounds right here on the ball now if you've got one thing 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 10 000 pound hitch and let's say my receiver is like 12 000 pounds which i think it is because it's a this truck has a max tow package but anyway if i have a 6 000 pound ball which is determined by the how big the shaft on the ball is then that's going to be my limiting factor if that's my lowest point so for my setup i should not be exceeding 6000 pound unless i change out this ball so i want to go back to tow capacity for a second as i mentioned manufacturers are in this bs war about trying to claim the most towing capacity so there's a few things to keep in mind number one is mostly marketing number two uh the truck that you actually buy like for instance my truck it's not gonna have anywhere near the towing capacity that they're advertising in the commercials because the trucks that they advertise or the suvs that they advertise with those tow ratings are very specific packages it might be a totally stripped up model with a long bed with no options with extra towing gear that nobody orders in other words probably your vehicle you have is not set up that way and therefore does not have that high of a tow rating so the test that the manufacturers do it's called something it's something called j2807 so basically j2807 establishes criteria for manufacturers the vehicle has to be able to tow a certain amount amount of weight up a certain percentage grade at a certain speed without overheating or breaking it also comes at a certain temperature and there's other criteria they look at but again this is this is a it's not a controlled environment but it's an environment that you are not entering into when you're towing your travel trailer towing a load of bricks up a hill in arizona with a perfectly equipped truck it's not the situation you're in so you can't go based on that weight rating and that's why i'm making 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 so with my truck as an example i showed you the payload is fifteen hundred pounds now let's assume that i have a ten thousand pound trailer which in fact the manual says this truck can tow somewhere around twelve thousand pounds based on how it's configured but what we're gonna show now is that actually it can't most likely because we're gonna overload the payload and here's why so let's say we've got our ten thousand pound trailer let's say that it has a fifteen percent tongue weight meaning that fifteen percent of the trailer weight is pushing down on the tongue of the trailer where it interfaces with your hitch that's on the higher end but it could be anywhere between 10 and 20 percent it varies a lot but let's say that it's a 15 for this trailer so now that's 1500 pounds so we can already see we have a problem we've already maxed out the payload of my truck and that's before i get in the seat that's before i put cargo in the bed that's before i put my wife and kid in it or any sort of camping gear so basically i'm already sol i can't tow that trailer because i can't load anything in the truck i'm already at my maximum payload capacity with zero items in the truck as your passengers just being hitched up and that's why payload is important and that's why you're gonna be exceeding your payload capacity far before you exceed your tow rating so in the real world i'm going to have you know 300 pounds worth of passengers let's say i have another 300 pounds of camping gear that's 600 pounds right there so 1 500 pounds which is my payload overall payload capacity minus that 600 leaves me only 900 pounds for the tongue weight of the trailer now if i had a trailer that had a 10 ton weight i could do a 9 000 pound trailer assuming that that was 10 would be 900 pounds but if i had a trailer with a 15 ton weight which is more like what my lance has that means i'm going to be limited to a 6 000 pound trailer because 15 of 6000 is 900 pounds okay so here's a real world example of what i'm talking about with payload and how it's so easy to approach your payload even with the trailer that's only half the weight of your tow vehicle's rating so like i mentioned my tow vehicle has a weight uh tow rating of something like 12 000 pounds my trailer has a gross vehicle weight rating of 5 500 pounds it's pretty lightly loaded right now i don't have any fresh water in it so i might be around 5 000 pounds there abouts the hitch weight if you figure 10 to 15 percent i'm probably around between five somewhere between 500 and 700 pounds hitch weight the hitch weights always actually are a little heavier in reality than i think than the manufacturers will say so you can see how i'm using a weight distribution hitch to push some of this weight back onto the trailer axles and also back onto the front axle of the truck now don't pay too much attention here because that this is kind of cattywampus with the terrain is unlevel here so it looks like my suspension travels all crazy but don't worry about that if you look at the cargo that i have so i've got a motorcycle which is around um you know probably close to 300 pounds with luggage and four gallons of gas in it i've got um you know baby strollers i've got ramps and over here if you look i've got a generator which is pretty heavy like 70 pounds i've got propane bottles fuel tanks and then we're going to have stuff inside the truck that's going to add weight cargo passengers got my wife and my kid so probably let's say that um let's say the hitch uh weight is just 600 pounds and let's say i've got about well i've got a 300 pound motorcycle so that's 900 pounds i've got hundred another hundred pounds of camping here that's a thousand pounds three hundred pounds of passengers so i'm up to thirteen hundred pounds and my payload's only fifteen hundred so i'm within two hundred pounds of overloading this f-150 with a max tow package and a three-five ecoboost with the small little five thousand pound trailer so think about that um if you've got a big trailer and a bunch of gear and a big family you're probably overloading your half ton truck just telling you that for a fact so anyway let's get on with the video now you might be saying well why does it matter if i'm over payload you know my truck can take it or i've towed bigger trailers than that with my chevy colorado or my you know whatever vehicle it is and i was just fine and my buddy joe did this well there's a couple reasons why you do not want to go over your payload capacity even if you think your vehicle can handle it number one is liability if you if god forbid you were to be in some sort of accident with your rig and anyone was injured or there's any sort of property damage good luck in any sort of lawsuit if it was found to be that you had overloaded your vehicle passes legal limits the other thing is just general safety so even if you don't get in an accident you know you want to feel confident and safe that your family's okay going up and down mountain passes and things like that with your trailer and just you don't want to be over stressing your vehicle so there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to overload the legal limits of your of your truck car suv so you really need to pay attention to this payload thing and make sure you're not going over gvwr so there's a couple other checkpoints that you need to make sure you're okay with your vehicle is going to have a gross axle weight rating or gawr now this is harder to weigh because you're going to have to go to a truck scale to actually know how much weight is on your individual axle but sometimes you might reach your axle weight rating before you hit the maximum payload of your truck further adding to the complication of this but i would say for most people if you make sure you're sticking to your payload limits you're probably not going to have too much a problem with your gross axle weight rating but it is something to keep in mind that is another rating that you're supposed to be within next up on the checklist is the tires of your truck so tires actually have a load range and you'll see like load range c d and e are common i'm not going to go deeply into this but you need to you need to know what those weight ratings are and make sure that that's not a limiting factor for you so if you have like let's say load range c tires on your truck which aren't that heavy and you're maximum at your payload you might be hitting the max weight rating on your tires for that axle before you hit your payload so just something another thing to keep in mind but i would say on average you're probably going to run into that payload problem before you start overloading the weight rating of your tires okay let's talk briefly about towing safety and specifically trailer sway trailer sway is a common issue it's extremely dangerous and if you've ever been through it it's one of the most scary things you can ever experience when you're driving a vehicle and towing so there's a couple things that contribute to a swaying trailer the most common is weight that's not balanced properly front to back on the trailer so towing stability is greatly impacted by how much by having weight by having more weight on the front of the trailer on the tongue of the trailer than the back a lot of you have seen the video out there which uses the model i'll try to put a clip of that here where they move weight to the back of the model trailer and the trailer will not correct a sway but if they move that way to the front of the trailer the trailer will have a little sway and then it will stop it'll correct itself this is incredibly important to understand and this is the reason why um trailers have are not totally balanced front to back they're going to have more weight on the front which contributes to the payload problem that you often have with your vehicle because you've got all that weight pushing down on your hitch but it also makes for more stable towing experience and and minimizes that sway now that's not to say that even if you have that proper tongue weight of 10 to 15 percent that you can't have sway you still can have really bad sway other things that contribute to it would be an improperly loaded setup anywhere in your truck trailer improperly inflated tires strong crosswinds you know being passed by trucks or just having a really long trailer with a lot of side area that's being impacted by the wind and a small tow vehicle the wheelbase of your vehicle impacts the stability so there's a lot of factors so my advice to mitigate any sort of sway is a couple things number one make sure you're within all of your limits for your truck and your trailer everything we talked about in this video make sure that all your tires on your truck and trailer are properly inflated make sure that you don't have way too big of a trailer for the truck or tow vehicle that you're using make sure that when you load your trailer that you're focusing any excess extra weight that you're loading in towards the front of the trailer there's a reason why propane tanks and batteries are at the front of trailers or not at the back so there's other things you can do to help control 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 the house sway control built in so i'll put photos of these here but the suede control bars use a friction system to help prevent sway it gives you one extra thing to hook up and i don't like them so what i use i use a hitch a weight distribution hitch that has sway control built in because of friction on the metal weight bars pressing down right here okay so how do you know if you need a weight distribution hitch well there's a few ways to tell it's not an exact science so weight distribution hitches are used to simply transfer some weight off of the tongue of the trailer off of your hitch um to the front axle of your tow vehicle and also back onto the axle or axles of the trailer this is helpful for several reasons one it can help reduce the squat and the overloading of the the bumper of your vehicle it can improve the handling and the ride of your vehicle because you're shifting some of that weight off the back back towards the front and balancing that weight you're increasing your steering response and your steering feel and safety also you've probably gathered by now that this actually does reduce your payload problem a little bit because it shifts some of the weight back to the axles of the trailer now i don't include that in the calculation because i figured to be on the safe side and assuming maybe you don't use one of these weight distribution hitches that you need to calculate the full tongue weight of the trailer when calculating your payload but yes technically if you use a weight distribution hitch you are taking a little bit of weight off of that but it's it's not a whole lot so again i really wouldn't factor that in but how do you really know you need a weight distribution hitch well if you notice that your tow vehicle is really sagging when you put your trailer on then you probably need one if you're approaching the maximum payload or the maximum tow rating or even within i would say 60 percent or so of any of those figures you probably want to consider a weight distribution hitch i pretty much always toe with the weight distribution hitch even if i'm in doubt about needing it because it helps control sway i prefer how it helps restore the handling of my truck and it just gives a more balanced feel overall now the downside is it's a little bit more work to hook up and detach and attach but you know you 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 usually they're overloading their truck or suv in terms of payload far before they're reaching that maximum tow rating so even with this modest lance trailer which is a 21 foot trailer it way it has a gvwr 5500 pounds which is less than half the tow rating of my f-150 with the max tow package and the 3.5 ecoboost so you might think to yourself well i've got this really impressive 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 over in terms of payload on my truck i can barely put a lightweight motorcycle in without going overweight on my payload of my truck and my best advice i can give you is no offense to salesmen and dealerships but don't trust what the car dealer is telling you and don't trust what the rv dealer's telling you because their job is to move units and make their commission not to ensure your safety they don't know all the factors going into it that we've covered in this video so do don't listen to them do your own homework knowledge is power with all that being said i hope to see you guys out in the campgrounds not on the road i wish you all a safe rv experience if this video was helpful please give it a thumbs up please subscribe to the channel for more rb content and we'll see you out there [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Big Rock Moto

Views: 783,386

Keywords: payload, towing guide, how to tow, travel trailer, rv, fifth wheel, WDH, weight distribution, GVWR, GCWR, tow capacity, what can i tow, sierra 1500, silverado 1500, ram 1500, towing a travel trailer, lance, forest river, keystone, jayco, grand design, airstream, popup camper, tent trailer, hitch rating, trailer weight, trailer GVWR, trailer towing 101, understanding payload, big truck big rv, keep your daydream, what can i tow with my f150, what can i tow with my ram 1500, tacoma

Id: gIhRJe1O5eY

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020