Tow No! Or Life's a Hitch

Like most Americans, I'm convinced that I'm a pretty good driver. I know how to get to the inside lane of a traffic circle and then, when it's time to exit, dodge the stupid people driving around the outside. I always pick the fastest line at the toll plaza. I don't want to brag, but I can parallel park on the first try 70 percent of the time. Yet, for all that amazing talent, there's one driving situation that fills me with palpable, stomach-knotting, existential dread: I love driving, but I hate towing.

There are too many variables when towing a trailer. Say you've got a boat trailer. The hitch can come off the car, the trailer can come off the hitch, the boat can come off the trailer, and the wheels can come off the hubs. Assuming none of that happens, you'll inevitably leave something in the boat that will take flight at highway speeds. If the trailer has brakes, they won't work. Or they'll seize up. The lights will short out. You'll get a flat. You'll fry a bearing. You know why trailer parks always get hit by tornadoes? Because even the weather hates trailers.

Horses were the original tow vehicles. Even then, records from early settlers indicate that towing was one of the major stresses of frontier life, right up there with train robberies and syphilis. Here is a typical diary entry from a forty-niner heading west in the nineteenth century: "Today I was towing the Wagon when a Spoke gave way, causing the right wheel to Collapse. In addition, the noise startled my mare and caused her to suffer a Severe Hernia. And the system of Ropes, Pulleys, and pennants I devised to signal Following wagons of imminent change of Direction seems to work only when someone is standing Behind and Observing, but never when Under Way."

By 1987, things had barely improved. I base this statement on my father's 1987 Dodge Ram. You know how, when you see a homeless person with a dog, you think, "Why does that guy have a dog when he can't even take care of himself?" The same could be said of the Ram and its trailer hitch. The big Dodge, with its slant six, sounded like an obese man breathing through a straw and had a hard enough time moving when unburdened by a trailer. My father once found himself stranded on a boat ramp when the Dodge lacked the power to budge its load. It was quite a quandary until a band of scuba divers emerged from the water and helped push the whole works up to level ground. There aren't many car stories that end, "I don't know what I would've done without the frogmen," but of course when there is, a trailer is involved.

Some months back, I ignored the advice of economists and my own better judgment and joined the ranks of boat owners. Which means that I now have a trailer. On the happy occasion of the first trip home from the dealer, I hook my new vessel to a two-wheel-drive Ford F-150 SuperCrew with a 5.4-liter V-8. Depending on the axle ratio, this basic F-150 can tow up to 11,300 pounds (if you buy an F-250 or other heavy-duty pickup these days, presumably you're using it to mine the oil sands of Alberta or push the space shuttle onto the launchpad). My boat weighs a fraction of the F-150's capacity, and the truck has electronic sway control to keep the trailer from fishtailing. So, as I head down the highway on my trip home, I'm feeling confident-until my phone rings. It's the salesman. "I forgot to tell you," he says, "You'll need to stop somewhere along the way, because during the first trip, the lug nuts on the trailer will loosen up." So even with a trailer that's fifteen minutes old, I have to worry about the wheels flying off on I-95. I pull over, grab the F-150's tire iron, and discover that, indeed, the lug nuts are all horrendously loose. Which brings me to my next problem: while tow vehicles have improved dramatically, trailers have not.

I've never had a problem with the hubs on any car I've owned or driven, but for trailer manufacturers, coaxing a spinning wheel to reliably support a load is an unsolvable riddle. If Vegas took odds, I'd put money on the perfection of cold fusion before the advent of trailer bearings that last longer than a round trip to the local Dairy Queen.

Automobile Magazine senior editor Joe Lorio, wise to the perils of trailers, once tried to dodge towing headaches by renting rather than buying a camper trailer. Of course, that was a futile idea. "We drove home at night," he says, "and when I got out, I smelled something burning. Turns out one of the hubs had destroyed itself, and there was all this burnt-something dust everywhere. I had to call the owner the next day and give him the news that his trailer couldn't be driven anywhere. He came out and sat on my front porch for the better part of the afternoon, awaiting the arrival of a wrecker from AAA. Eventually the trailer left on a flatbed. I don't see another camping vacation in my immediate future."

Technical editor Don Sherman, who, until recently, wrote a towing column for Boating Magazinehas a lively story about his nineteen-foot Checkmate attempting to overtake a Saturn Vue during a braking test. By the time the car stopped, the bow of the boat was partway onto the roof. Again, the sentence, "And that's how we got the boat off the roof of the Saturn," could only involve a trailer.

The tales of anguish and misery extend to pretty much everyone who's ever pulled something behind a car. Last summer, my friend Steve suffered a blowout on his triple-axle boat trailer. The blowout inflicted a fast leak on an adjacent tire, which was a problem since the boat was on the trailer and he was miles from the closest launch ramp. This precipitated a race to the nearest ramp to unload the trailer before the other tire went completely flat. Why not disconnect the trailer, I asked, and go get the tires fixed? "Yeah, right," he said. "Leave my boat next to the highway? People are scavengers. It's like Somalia." This is probably the first time that I've heard Rhode Island compared to Somalia, but that's what towing does to your worldview.

Truck aficionados argue over what is the best tow vehicle. Is it a Dodge Ram Cummins dualie? A GMC 3500 Duramax with the Allison transmission? A Ford F-950, or whatever the heaviest of heavy duty is these days? It is none of those. The best tow vehicle is the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8, because that particular Jeep is completely honest. Under the stats for the SRT8's tow rating, there's not a number but two wise words: Not Recommended.

By Ezra Dyer
Illustration: Tim Marrs