Towing with a Sedan

I will say that after towing with a 1/2 ton pickup, I wouldn't want to tow a heavy load with a short-wheelbase, lower-visibility vehicle.  Other drivers darn near killed me at least twice in a year of towing infrequently. There's a reason everyone goes with a truck to tow: they're great at it!

If you can convince a jury that knows nothing about cars that something is unsafe, then it is unsafe. But then you can appeal if the judgment is excessive. A lot of those do get overturned. 

Of course there is a difference between winning a lawsuit and collecting on a lawsuit. I see lots of people towing crap cars with other crap cars using ropes, chains and many other weird contraptions here in Dallas, but suing uninsured poor people is not profitable for lawyers even if they are doing something that is clearly unsafe. Insurance companies are also very good at avoiding liability for things you aren't covered for. Towing heavy cars with tiny hatchbacks is probably not covered. Read the fine print. 

I towed my 3100 lb. dirt track car with a '71 GMC half ton for years. Then I had a '68 Chevy Suburban until some gut in a Ford Ranger did a high speed custom job on it in an intersection. Now I use an Express 2500. Worked just fine towing the Avenger from Arkansas to New York and back. I want a one ton, crew cab, long bed, dually Dodge with a Cummins. Do I need it? No. Will I get one ? Probably not. I just think they are cool. 

    I towed with a VOLVO 850 sedan!   But I used the lightest aluminum trailer you can buy, and the race car wasn't very heavy.

      The trailer was expensive, but I figured it was cheaper than buying a truck.   After the Volvo I now use a BMW X3, not exactly a truck, but still keeping the load fairly light.

In reply to buzzboy :

I have been towing with cars since 1962.  ( straight 8 Buick hobby Stock car  pulled with my Dad's 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible. Later with a 1953 Cadillac hearse 

 My Jaguar DProd race car with a 1962 Buick wildcat ( convertible).   That back and forth to Wisconsin from San Diego 4 times.  Plus all the SCCA races. 
  A triple axle 2 car trailer to & from the Bahama's  2 times. Towed behind a Mercury sedan w/ 460 cu in  engine.  
 Plus all sorts of vintage races  in nearby states. 
     I'm trying to remember how many times I pulled my Black Jack Special  across the mountain ranges in my enclose tandem axle S10 Chevy or S15 GMC   Both with the 2.8 V6  I think it's 6 round trips 

    My one and only incident was a Blown out well worn cheap recap. Doing 100mph along side the Bonneville salt flats.   Result bent rim.  Nothing scary. ( well,  I no longer use Re-capped  tires, but I'm not sure if that's a learned lesson or they just don't recap tires anymore) 

    My next trailer will be pulled behind my 1972 Jaguar XJ12  sedan.   
 In all cases it was with a home made trailer 

Without reading all the entries, I also tow regularly with cars- my current 2009 MINI Clubman S has towed my classic Mini all over the country many, many times. Twice I've had heart stopping moments when an idiot turns in front of me and I have to really haul on the brakes......always in town and always at lower speeds like 30 mph....other than that it cruises easily at 70-75 mph and gets about 27 mpg doing it!

In the past (late 1960's) I towed my Sprite race car on a single axle trailer behind my Volvo wagon.

I also moved to Southern California from Denver with a Uhaul trailer behind my Porsche 914.

Bottom line, it's completely do able, you just need the right hitch and plan to take the easiest route possible.

A vintage racing friend has a  1972 Corvette big block, He's thinking of having me make him a very lite trailer  to pull his Formula Ford behind it. 
  He'll need a set of rains and a modest tool box.   
  My thoughts are we can build the trailer to weigh less than 300 pounds with perhaps as little as 50 pounds tongue weight. 
     Build the tow bar off the IRS  mount.  
   
Will it work? 

My car is heavier, has a longer wheelbase, and has larger brakes than some of the trucks I have towed with.

That said I keep having this weird vision of making a wheels-off toad kind of thing.  Jack up the car and install a kind of removable axle setup into receivers in the body, about halfway-2/3rd of the way along the wheelbase, lower the car, insert a trailer tongue into the front into another receiever setup, and the car becomes its own trailer.

What forces a lot of people into trucks is the trailer.  Built by some shop out of 1/4 inch box section as if it's designed to haul a bulldozer. 
    Look at  the over the  road semi trailers, less than 10% of the load weight pulled by a tractor that is 20% of the total weight. 
   Yet they last decades. 

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Interesting concept. 

I bought my disco to haul my sailboat.  It does it quite well.

many moons ago when I was a young lad in the 70s, you rarely saw somebody put a boat in the water with a pickup, they all used fullsized cars and station wagons. It was always fun to watch as they would go back far enough to submerge the rear bumper and exhaust to get the boat off or on. The underwater burble of a big v8 was great.

Uncle David (Forum Supporter) said:

In the late 70's, my father towed a 5000 lb travel trailer with a '76 Coupe DeVille. Besides the hitch receiver, he added air shocks, an external transmission cooler, and... that's it.  Towed fine other than being a little bit slow due mostly to the too-tall standard rear gears. 

He was also a subscriber to Trailer Life magazine.  I, as a young gearhead, would read the tow vehicle reviews.  Around 1982 or so they did a survey to find the most popular tow vehicle.  F250? Nope.  C20? Nope.  Suburban? Nope.  1972 Olds 98.   Yeah, towing with a sedan is fine, you just need the right sedan

I remember plenty of Olds 98esq cars towing large trailers.  This was how you did it all the way up to probably the mid '80s.  Anybody else remember those big oversized mirrors you'd strap to the car?  '72 Olds 98 would have been a good choice but I'd have preferred a Buick Electra.  Of all the 7.4 liters GM made, Flint's was the gruntiest.  

In reply to A 401 CJ :

I remember those trailer hitches that just sort of clamped onto the bumper!

I used to tow this with a Pontiac 6000 STE...

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

...That said I keep having this weird vision of making a wheels-off toad kind of thing.  Jack up the car and install a kind of removable axle setup into receivers in the body, about halfway-2/3rd of the way along the wheelbase, lower the car, insert a trailer tongue into the front into another receiever setup, and the car becomes its own trailer.

I've had a sorta similar idle thought, specifically using a gooseneck 'tow bar'.

Your add-an-axle setup would be much better than trying to use the towee's rear axle (either directly w/ streetable tires, or on a Collins dolly).  If I did the math right: assuming the towee has 50-50 weight dist and we want a max of 20% 'tongue' weight, the length of the tow bar needs to be 1.5x the towee's WB (so the trailer OAL = at least 2.5x towee's WB).  Not impossibly long, but not very compact either.

Obviously the tow vehicle would need to have a gooseneck hitch: convertible= easy; sedan= maybe?; wagon= probably not?; ute or truck= cheating.

Amusing comment under a military-related youtube vid:

Modify that with a simple axle extender    bolt another set of wheels in place of the originals on a spindle.  Set the parking brake  and the "trailer"  wheels  do the spinning..  

I wanted to move the axle forward, using the car's wheels would not work.  For one, that makes the grand assumption that the car could roll. 

The whole idea stemmed from a thought exercise of wondering just how much trailer one really needs.  If you don't need to be able to drive onto it, and if the trailer axle supported the car directly instead of under the tires, it could be very light indeed.

The dragster where I used to work was bolted to the inside of the trailer.  You'd roll it into a certain spot, raise it up a little, stick wooden blocks under certain spots to take the weight off of the tires, and through-bolt it to the trailer floor.  No straps, no worries.  (The rest of the trailer was a very intricate mobile machine shop, to resurface the clutches between runs and so forth)

If you're not putting tools/parts into the car, you could figure out where under the trailed car the axle needs to be to get your desired tongue weight. You could then take the front wheels off (for ground clearace) and have a hitch mount on the front of the trailed car. That connection would be critical though.

For the tongue weight thing, you can lighten the tongue weight of a trailer without losing stability by making the tongue longer.  A longer distance from hitch to trailer axles will more weight onto the trailer axles (if the load hasn't moved relative to them) and will also add stability in general.  The biggest thing for stability is to minimize weight behind the trailer axles (measuring tongue weight is somewhat of a crude attempt at this). 

The less weight you have behind the trailer axles, the more stable the trailer will be.  This is why some trailers are extremely stable, but others (often boat trailers) will get upset much more easily (too much weight behind the axles, so more momentum to sway with). 

"I took my Cobra down to the ytack, hooked to the back of my CADILLAC"

Still works todat

YRMV