Saltwater Soul
Well-Known Member
I've now had my 2018 Expedition Platinum with Heavy Tow package for about six months now. I bought it thinking I would get back into larger boats. I've not had the opportunity to tow anything heavy yet. My current boat is only 3,500 pounds and I only go 1/4 mile to the boat ramp. I have a small 4x6 cargo trailer that is less than 2,000 even with stuff in it. It doesn't seem to be noticable when I drag it around.
My brother needed his 30' travel trailer moved about 80 miles over flat terrain. I'm guessing it might have been 8,000 pounds with a 700 lb+ tongue weight. I made a few observations on this tow and sprinkled in a few questions:
My brother needed his 30' travel trailer moved about 80 miles over flat terrain. I'm guessing it might have been 8,000 pounds with a 700 lb+ tongue weight. I made a few observations on this tow and sprinkled in a few questions:
- Expy had absolutely no problems at all with this load. I purposely tried to keep it under 70 mph but found myself slipping above from time to time despite the pretty good headwinds. Acceleration from a stop was easy. I feel pretty confident I could drag a pretty good sized boat now.
- Braking seemed just fine and gave me a lot of confidence.
- I used tow/haul mode. I did notice that the vehicle mostly stayed in 8 but did move to 9 more when I changed direction to be more perpendicular to the prevailing wind. Is this typical in this mode? Is there some other strategy I should have used?
- Fuel economy was a little less than I expected. Vehicle calculation was 8.5 mpg for the tow. I know this is optimistic on my vehicle from hand calculation. Real value was likely below 8 mpg. Some of this was likely the headwinds and the fact I was in 8 for much of the highway miles. For those of you that tow travel trailers, is this typical? I was hoping to best 10 mpg. My towing experience is mostly with bigger boats and they certainly seem more streamlined.
- I sure would have loved tow mirrors. I hate not being able to see well behind me and backing up was tough.
- Vehicle did squat quite a bit without the Weight Distributing Hitch. Once I hooked that up, I was quite level. I experienced almost no sway other than a bit of buffeting winds from a brewing thunderstorm. As I won't have a WDH with large boats, I may have to look into some sort of extra support back there if I will have a heavy tongue weight.
- As in another current thread, I to had to mess around to tell the Expy that I no longer had the trailer connected as it was still showing miles later. Finally figured out how to select "no trailer" but it was a bit of a pain.
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