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!
So we actually ended up moving forward on a used Gold-certified ‘22 Highlander XLE with a pretty clean carfax and somewhere between 45-50k miles. Has a V6, AWD w/o rear diff, electric tow hitch. Clocks in at 1390 lbs cargo capacity. Gonna have the shop take a look at it as soon as we can get it off the lot once it’s ready.
We are ditching the RV idea, though in the future this should leave room for that if we really wanted to settle down with that much further down the line, within the discussed constraints. So thanks again for your input! What I’m curious about is the electric dongle you’ve attached to get those readings — Do you recommend one in specific? Not sure if they come universal, or need to be model-specific.