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, I've moved a lot of really stupid bullshit with a really small "SUV" in my life. My venerable old Callie, a manual-trans 1999 Subaru Forester that's actually just a Impreza passenger sedan with a station wagon body on top, has successfully moved a flatbed trailer probably 12-15 times some pretty long distances with upwards of 5000lb on the trailer alone. The car is rated for 1500lb towing.
Let me tell you, she does NOT like it, and is not fast. But she can do it, because I'm extremely careful about it.
A vast majority of vehicles are actually fully capable of towing a lot more weight than their nameplate, in terms of engine power. The main things that limit their SAFE capability is braking force and highway stability. Manufacturers set the nameplate limits to where they can guarantee the vehicle stays safe even if operated very incorrectly, with all the weight in one spot, by a complete doofus. They're more for legal protection more than anything; "sorry you were 10lb over the rated limit, that crash isn't our fault."
You can actually go over the rated cargo capacity by a few hundred pounds and not worry too much, just make sure it's spread out evenly across the vehicle. I guarantee you a 4runner can hold more than 880lb inside, with it being a solid rear axle and all.
as far as towing goes:
Braking force. Passenger cars only have brakes with enough force to quickly stop a vehicle of the nameplate GVWR. There is a decent bit of engineered factor of safety here, so that's how you get a towing capacity around 2000lb higher. Once you exceed that, your braking distance is going to increase linearly, since brakes can only remove a certain amount of energy (and kinetic energy is =mv^2). This also can cause them to overheat if going down large mountain slopes.
With 5500lb total behind my Forester, my braking distance effectively tripled. You can mash the brake into the floor and it would just keep going, it's really spooky if you're used to driving normal unloaded vehicles. I was doing my hauling on empty rural roads, but I would straight shit myself if I had to take that into traffic.
To combat this, trailers use additional brakes on their own axles, powered either by an electronic brake controller or via a hydraulic cylinder on the trailer tongue ("surge" brakes). I added a junkyard brake controller to my Forester, and it restored a ton of braking force. On the product page for the NuCamp 320, it says it has electric brakes, so that's good. This does mean you need to have an electric brake controller on whatever vehicle you tow with. Tons of mechanics shops can wire those in for you though.
Vehicle/trailer stability. This is what is collectively known as "trailer sway"
Basically, physics says the trailer needs to weigh less than the vehicle, and must be applying a minimum portion of it's mass to the rear axle of the vehicle so that the vehicle can continue guiding it. If the trailer weighs more, it must transfer an equivalent force via tongue weight to keep things stable; that's how semitrucks work with a 5th wheel right over the rear axle.
With too heavy of a trailer, or too bad a weight distribution, the trailer will begin pushing the vehicle around on the road. If the imbalance is extremely poor, and the driver doesn't know how to stop it, shit happens.
The general rule is you should have 15% of the trailer's weight on the tongue. Most SUV's these days have extremely low tongue weight ratings because of their independent rear suspension- usually less than 300lb, which gets you that 2000lb tow rating.
The good part is proper trailer balance (aka store stuff in the front half of your trailer, NOT the back half) and using an electric brake controller can get rid of this; gently applying the trailer-only brakes helps bring trailers back to straight.
Of course, with those two things taken care of, you then have to worry about your transmission's capability and cooling, and engine cooling. Those you primarily just need to monitor closely using gauges or a OBD-II dongle paired to a phone running Torque app to get engine/trans data. My forester would like to start overheating if I tried to do 60mph in 4th gear too long.
I assume you're buying a new vehicle? Look at a Ford Explorer with the 3.0L V6. They give those a 5300lb tow rating and I can vouch for them actually being really good vehicles.
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.