Your Top 5 Towbar Questions Answered

To tow or not to tow? Is that ever the question?

Towing is actually a pretty tricky topic if you haven’t got much experience in the area. Plenty of questions get asked of us each day and a question asked is a disaster averted. Have a look below to see our five towbar basics from your questions and help prevent a towing-related mishap in Sydney this summer:

1. Get the Right Towbar
The worst thing you can do when you’re towing something, be it trailer, caravan or boat, is to choose the wrong towbar for the job. Every sort of towbar will have a different weight capacity so you’ll need to do a bit of maths and research to find out exactly how much you intend to tow and what sort of towbar you’ll need to do the job.

2. Know Your Vehicle’s Limits
Of course, even if you choose the right sort of towbar, you can still make the same mistake of towing too much if you don’t find out what the weight limit is for your vehicle. Have a look through any documentation that came with your car and see if there’s anything about tow ratings. If you can’t find anything, call the dealer you purchased the vehicle from.

3. Preventing Sway With Your Towbar
Not every tow job will be easy and sometimes it can be difficult, if not impossible, to prevent sway while you’re driving. Sway is when the trailer begins to move from side-to-side regardless how you’re driving. It’s actually one of the biggest contributors to towing-related accidents, but there are things you can do to correct it. One of the easiest ways is to assess your load before you start driving. If the back end of your trailer is sagging, simply using a weight distributing hitch on your towbar can see your trailer straightening up and staying level.

4. The Mini-Hitch Explained
When you’re looking at towbars you might stumble across the mini-hitch. It sounds and looks pretty cool, but when can you use it? The answer to that is simple: for very low towing weights, usually for anything with a ball weight of up to 82kg (a ball weight is the downward weight placed on the vehicle’s towball from the coupling of the trailer).

5. Towbar and Towing Regulations
In Australia, we’re lucky to have national standards and guidelines to help you tow your trailer safely. The general rule is that you cannot tow more than the smallest allowed weight for both your vehicle and the trailer, so if your trailer can take a weight of 750kg and your car can tow a tonne, you can only tow up to 750kg. For more information on towing regulations check out our post The NSW Guide to Towing Trailers and Hitches.

Being able to tow a trailer, the boat or your caravan can really change your lifestyle and make it a piece of cake for you to see what Sydney and NSW have to offer. Towing definitely isn’t simple but if you do your homework and learn to understand your towbar, not to mention a lot of hands-on practice as well, it will get easier.

Read more about Sydney Towbars in our previous articles: What to Look Out for When Buying a Towbar and What are Your Towing Restrictions in Sydney?

This blog was posted in TopTips, Towbars and tagged in caravans, hitches, Towbars, trailers