My Combination is Safe and I Know It

[JonDNC]

Think about this from the perspective of the manufacture

BMW/Mercedes/Audi/Porsche let’s see give or take less than 1% of our clientele wants to tow something bigger than a utility trailer or a single motorcycle. Amount of effort and $$ put into towing capacity. Minimal

Big 3 heavy duty truck category. 90% plus of our customers want to tow and tow big. Amount of effort and $$ put into that capability. A lot.

Hmm where do you want to place your bet???

[jcl]

Originally Posted by DewTheDew

So which BMW models besides the X models are you talking about towing with? A 5er?

All of them.

Personally, I wouldn’t have towed with our Z4. I didn’t need to tow with the 3, as we had an X at the same time. I couldn’t tow with the 535 here in North America, according to BMW, and didn’t ow with it, but it undoubtedly would have been an even more capable tow vehicle than an X5. Same power, better braking, less weight, lower CoG. A German version of Andy Thomson’s Jaguar tow vehicle.

[jcl]

Originally Posted by DewTheDew

This to me defines "lazy": For many of them, it is simply not worth the trouble to figure out the maximum capability of their vehicles when fitted out with WD equipment, which they can't legally even use where they live and work.

But hey, I'm not the one imagining that BMW, Audi and Mercedes engineers never set foot in the US and don't test their vehicles here and are therefore ignorant of WD hitches and uninterested in increasing market share in their largest market.

Economic choices are different than laziness.

Nobody said they didn’t visit, or test vehicles here. Just that they didn’t test WD here. To test it, they would have had to design and develop a solution, and they don’t do that here. Do you imagine that the design standards within German vehicle manufacturer design offices have chapters on WD?

[jcl]

Originally Posted by JonDNC

Think about this from the perspective of the manufacture

BMW/Mercedes/Audi/Porsche let’s see give or take less than 1% of our clientele wants to tow something bigger than a utility trailer or a single motorcycle. Amount of effort and $$ put into towing capacity. Minimal

Big 3 heavy duty truck category. 90% plus of our customers want to tow and tow big. Amount of effort and $$ put into that capability. A lot.

Hmm where do you want to place your bet???

I fully agree with your sentiment. I would just point out that because of the 1% estimate for the Euro manufacturers, they often don’t even offer a hitch for those small trailers. BMW analyzed it and came up with bike racks as one of the biggest reasons for a hitch, so they developed and sold a custom bumper mounted bike rack that attached to the towing eye points, so no hitch required.

And while 90% of NA truck customers may say they want to tow, it is aspirational for many. Like how most Jeeps don’t ever leave the pavement.

[BayouBiker]

The nice thing about speculation is you never get tied down. At one moment you can claim they set an artificially low towing limit out of sales concerns for of potential towing customers for other models in their line and next you can say they don't care at all about attracting towing customers. It must be comfortable to have your cake and eat it too. It's great, you can never be wrong because it's just speculation.

[DewTheDew]

Originally Posted by jcl

All of them.

Personally, I wouldn’t have towed with our Z4. I didn’t need to tow with the 3, as we had an X at the same time. I couldn’t tow with the 535 here in North America, according to BMW, and didn’t ow with it, but it undoubtedly would have been an even more capable tow vehicle than an X5. Same power, better braking, less weight, lower CoG. A German version of Andy Thomson’s Jaguar tow vehicle.

Ah yes. And Ford is too lazy to decide the true ratings of their Mustang as well. The 1000 lbs is simply because the engineers are unaware of WD hitches because they work on cars and never see trucks. I would agree that the BMW engineers who work on non-X models do not pay attention to towing beyond their simple Euro hitch. But not out of ignorance or laziness; it is not designed or intended to tow.

[DewTheDew]

Originally Posted by BayouBiker

The nice thing about speculation is you never get tied down. At one moment you can claim they set an artificially low towing limit out of sales concerns for of potential towing customers for other models in their line and next you can say they don't care at all about attracting towing customers. It must be comfortable to have your cake and eat it too. It's great, you can never be wrong because it's just speculation.

Exactly. The bar continually moves.

[JonDNC]

Originally Posted by jcl

I fully agree with your sentiment. I would just point out that because of the 1% estimate for the Euro manufacturers, they often don’t even offer a hitch for those small trailers. BMW analyzed it and came up with bike racks as one of the biggest reasons for a hitch, so they developed and sold a custom bumper mounted bike rack that attached to the towing eye points, so no hitch required.

.

Exactly, we had the factory hitch installed on the SQ5. Purpose. Bike rack. Used it once to actually tow, a baby uhaul trailer, it worked. But would not have wanted to tow the big uhaul.

[jcl]

Originally Posted by DewTheDew

I would agree that the BMW engineers who work on non-X models do not pay attention to towing beyond their simple Euro hitch. But not out of ignorance or laziness; it is not designed or intended to tow.

Nothing simple about the Euro hitch developed by the BMW engineers for the car models. It is electrically activated, and retracts out of sight when not in use. It is a factory option, not a dealer option. The vehicle is definitely intended to tow, as those same engineers developed and provide Trailer Stability Control mode in the DSC system for these cars. I recall that the rear view camera has a hitching mode as well, but would have to confirm if the 2020 model has that towing feature.

It is just that the North American BMW marketing companies haven’t chosen to offer hitches or those already developed options here. I speculate that is due to their perception of little potential take up in this market. So, an economic decision. You can speculate that the NA employees are just lazy if you like.

[DewTheDew]

Originally Posted by jcl

Nothing simple about the Euro hitch developed by the BMW engineers for the car models. It is electrically activated, and retracts out of sight when not in use. It is a factory option, not a dealer option. The vehicle is definitely intended to tow, as those same engineers developed and provide Trailer Stability Control mode in the DSC system for these cars. I recall that the rear view camera has a hitching mode as well, but would have to confirm if the 2020 model has that towing feature.

It is just that the North American BMW marketing companies haven’t chosen to offer hitches or those already developed options here. I speculate that is due to their perception of little potential take up in this market. So, an economic decision. You can speculate that the NA employees are just lazy if you like.

Just to be clear, I do not think the engineers are lazy nor ignorant. I am not the one who said "they can't be bothered" to do something. I'm not the one claiming they are ignorant of WD systems and the broad NA market. I am the not the one saying that this was an economic decision to ignore the largest market that BMW has. I am not the one saying that the GVWR is a "guideline". You speculate that it was a marketing decision rather than an engineering/liability decision but it is just that; speculation. It is fine to speculate as long as you indicate as such when you make these statements rather than pass them off as facts. Thanks.

[jcl]

Originally Posted by DewTheDew

Just to be clear, I do not think the engineers are lazy nor ignorant. I am not the one who said "they can't be bothered" to do something. I'm not the one claiming they are ignorant of WD systems and the broad NA market. I am the not the one saying that this was an economic decision to ignore the largest market that BMW has. I am not the one saying that the GVWR is a "guideline". You speculate that it was a marketing decision rather than an engineering/liability decision but it is just that; speculation. It is fine to speculate as long as you indicate as such when you make these statements rather than pass them off as facts. Thanks.

You are the one who introduced the terms ignorant and lazy to this discussion. I have refuted them several times, because to me those words generally describe people, not corporate entities, but you keep bringing them back in. It would be better if you didn't.

The "they" in "they can't be bothered" referred to a company, not an individual. You don't seem to like that phrase, but essentially, a corporate decision was made not to offer a product that existed, but for which more work was required (localization). The localization for the Euro hitch example I gave would have included changing the metric ball to a common NA one, to provide a location to attach safety chains, document a method to install a trailer brake controller, sourcing the new parts, updating manuals and tech literature, and so on. You can argue about whether those marketing company (subsidiary) decisions are made by engineers, marketers, or management, but it doesn't really matter, we are discussion the corporation and their marketing subsidiaries, not the individuals. They decided not to participate.

Sometimes, we can see the results of a local decision to participate, in the following example for the X5. The Euro hitch wouldn't work here, for the localization reasons listed above. The NA marketing organization sourced a locally made fabrication, packaged it with the Euro install instructions, and sold it through their dealers. But it wasn't a factory part. It was in the same category as things like exterior accessories, mud flaps, floor mats, etc. So you couldn't buy parts for the receiver kit, even if it was a replaceable part. The parts weren't supported in their distribution system so they became hot commodities in the resale market, as BMW NA stopped selling them when they updated the base model. They explained that it wasn't a BMW part, it was just a best effort to supply a hitch, and they weren't doing that any longer. Buy a new model X5. They avoided the requirement for 15 years of parts availability by sleight of hand.

Yes, we can certainly label claims that are speculation, and I did so in my last post, but speculation is exactly what you have done here.

You speculate that if a vehicle doesn't have a tow rating in a certain market, then that vehicle wasn't intended or designed to tow. It is an easily disproven claim. If the same vehicle is offered in different markets, and in one it has a relatively high tow rating, and has specific towing features such as TSC, factory supplied hitches and wiring interfaces, etc, then IMO it is reasonable to assume the vehicle was designed to tow. When a marketing organization of that manufacturer in a specific geographic area says the vehicle is not intended to tow, it is clearly their decision not to support towing. You can speculate that that is because of liability, but I ask you why that liability would vary by vehicle model, and why the same manufacturer would offer tow ratings for a vehicle built on the same platform as another that they don't offer a tow rating for. You can speculate that is because typical travel trailer designs vary from Europe to North America. That is true, but not for all trailers and trailer types. They don't say that just towing travel trailers is not supported. And when the TV manufacturer doesn't specify any trailer limits other than weight, the other characteristics don't appear to be the causal factor. When the Canadian and US marketing subsidiaries of the same manufacturer take different positions, it is even easier to poke holes in the claim. You take exception to saying that a decision by a marketing organization is a decision of marketers, and to be fair, we don't know what level of management made the decision. But it clearly wasn't a technical decision. The technical team designed a solution. And so your insistence on saying that the absence of a tow rating means the vehicle can't tow is unsupportable. It simply means that even if the manufacturer tested the towing capability, and they may not have, they didn't publish it. Your speculation is the root of the issue here. When people make broad speculative claims, like a vehicle not being able to tow, or the manufacturer's tow rating being representative of the ultimate towing capability of the vehicle platform, then the exceptions prove the false nature of the claim.

Brian continually makes the same error. He regularly speculates that a specific vehicle tow rating is limited by tow vehicle oversteer. He hasn't shown any proof of this, such as test results; he apparently has models on his computer that support his claim. He says they are too complicated for us to understand. When asked what assumptions he used to determine the critical speed, we get only vague answers. When his speculation is shown to have holes in it, he either describes it as "moving the goalposts" or ignores the response. When professionals install hitches and set the combinations up, he denigrates them. When they test their combinations, he says they aren't testing them correctly. And so on.

[BayouBiker]

The rules of evidence and proof are different depending on causal mechanisms. Physical process are (mostly) deterministic while human decision involve choice and consequence. Proof of deterministic systems follows the scientific method of developing a hypothesis (jcl incorrectly labels this speculation) and then attempting to disprove it. In that process evidence to support the hypothesis is derived from those attempts to disprove them.

So when I make a claim that a towing combination may be unstable I also support it with evidence derived from past attempts to disprove the claim. Things like manufactures guidance, industry experience, manufacturers tests, and first principle models that simulate physical processes tuned by real experience. I offer this evidence so someone who doubts my claim (hypothesis) has a mechanism to disprove it. It is not my role to prove my claim as deterministic systems can never be fully proved without full knowledge of exactly how the world works and without full knowledge of exactly what is going on say when a tow vehicle looses control including how many sand particles were on the road etc. , so my job is only to provide someone a means to disprove my claim. I have done that. The single best way to show I am wrong is an actual test. Interestingly, the professional installers who claim these vehicles can safely tow much more than the manufacturers advise don't perform the very tests that would show the manufacturers guidance is wrong. These installers claim they have disproved the manufacturers limits but they don't provide the necessary disproving evidence. They don't follow the scientific method.

jcl, on the other hand appeals to speculation about collective corporations and individual decisions. These involve choice and require direct proof to a reasonable uncertainty to establish as fact. So when someone speculates about human decisions they are required to provide evidence to support it to a reasonable certainty, because it is not possible without that evidence (who, when, where, etc.) to disprove it. With no evidence, it is idle speculation.

Generally, midsized European performance SUVs with GVWR of 5000-7000 lb and wheelbases between 105-120 inches will begin to experience oversteer towing 6000-6700 American made travel trailers. The reason is pure physics and is partially due to the static understeer gradient designed into the base vehicle. For many of the same reasons, these vehicle combinations generally have issues with sway if trailer yaw becomes excessive. Manufacturers limits support this, matrix based stability models support this, thousands and thousands of tests of these and similar combinations support this, reports of owner experience when rare conditions occur on the road support this. These avenues provide a basis for jcl and other naysayers to demonstrate the manufacturer guidance is wrong. Unsupported speculation about human motives is not one of the avenues.

[Countryboy59]

^^^^wow, I bet you guys are a blast around a campfire after a few beers!

[paiceman]

Originally Posted by DewTheDew

Ah yes. And Ford is too lazy to decide the true ratings of their Mustang as well. The 1000 lbs is simply because the engineers are unaware of WD hitches because they work on cars and never see trucks. I would agree that the BMW engineers who work on non-X models do not pay attention to towing beyond their simple Euro hitch. But not out of ignorance or laziness; it is not designed or intended to tow.

I would agree with your assesment of the ratings on the Mustang at 1000# EXCEPT, having been a GM at two different companies in different industries I can assure, at least in my experience that the corporate lawyers make the decisions on things like this - the engineers give the best case - worst case and average case and then the lawyers make their assesment and recommendtions. Plus, the manufacturer can print all they want but cannot control whether you or I use a WD hitch or not and if an incident occurs, even if the operator did not adhere to the guidelines, the manufactruer can and will be sued. Back when I worked it would cost us btween $5,000 and $10,000 just to have a contracted attorney walk in the courtroom door.

So, we are given numbers that in some sense have not much value.

[Rfriebele]

Anyone ever see this article? It's old but a Good description of how they arrive at these #s in the US anyway.

http://www.trucktrend.com/news/163-0...owing-capacity