My wife and I are aiming to break all of our belongings down as minimally as we can in order to be able to live on the road for a while (for a multitude of reasons.)

Within our budget and needs, we’ve decided on a NuCamp 320 teardrop trailer, which clocks in at ~2k lbs unloaded, 3,000 lbs max load. Her, myself and two pups all weigh 300 lbs together. Optimally, we’d like to start with just the vehicle first, and trailer later on as an upgrade.

We were initially looking at a toyota 4runner to pair with this given the advertised 1550 lbs of potential cargo capacity and tongue weight of the hitch. However in practicality, we saw no more than a max capacity of 880 lbs period in the door jams at the dealerships. Even in the off-road models, which just seemed… asinine? Using some calculators, that would seemingly give us very little-to-no wiggle room for any proper amount of livable necessities before we cross that threshold and run into myriad issues.

Now we’re wondering how people actually do it? Are we overthinking it? We did love the vehicle, but these numbers are waaay too close for comfort, seeing as most advice we find online generally recommends not crossing ~80% of the big number. We’ve begun looking at land cruisers as an alternative, but the way the market is right now, and the difference in cost for both new and used, it’s looking more and more infeasible. Don’t even get me started on the GX550.

Have you been through a similar situation? Any advice would be appreciated! 🤍

Edit for future visitors:

We ended up settling on a ‘22 Toyota Highlander XLE, and honestly we’re pretty excited about it! Even with an electric tow hitch, it clocks in at a healthy 1,390 lbs of cargo capacity, with even more room in the back to camp out of. That number will go down a decent bit with some rooftop storage, and maybe back up a little bit if we can (viably) take out the third row seating. But it more than suits our current needs as it stands 🥳

Thanks to the general good advice in the comments, we’ve put the idea of an RV at all on ice, transitioning to a more all-inclusive portable action plan. There were too many ways things could go wrong lugging one at such long distances for the timeframe of our trips. However, we’re really happy to be able to upgrade to that setup at any time we’d like to!

  • Shortstack@reddthat.com
    2·
    2 days ago

    Somewhat recently I was car shopping and looked into towing capacity for a Prius.

    No Prius stateside is rated for towing at all, but in Europe where they sell the same damn model it is rated for a light trailer going a max of ~65mph. It was my understanding from digging into it that the US version doesn’t officially have tow capacity because of the legal speed limit on our highways being above what it’s safely capable of.

    So at least in this one case it’s due to liability avoidance even though Prius can tow a light trailer if you drive like a grandma on the highway. If it’s true for that it’s probably true for other cars with more oomph

    • Daze@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      22 hours ago

      Yeah, what’s funny is during all this we noticed our Malibu’s cargo capacity is rated at almost 1,000 lbs in the door jam sticker.

      Now, obviously, as you say it’s definitely not translatable to a tow hitch rate, and we’d never attempt something stupid like attaching a hitch and towing with it. But we found it funny that (aside from interior space) for cargo travel alone, we’d be better off with what we already have than a 4runner! (again, generally, obv there are a select few base models that do a lil better.)

      I just don’t get why the 4runners are getting rated so low for what seems to be their most attractive feature. We saw the land cruisers seem to be a lot bulkier in the undercarriage.