517
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
517 points (90.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
9422 readers
584 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I agree but diesel cars are much more common in Europe and they have better towing capacity due to higher torque.
Not the core issue. My car does not run on Diesel, but I would not have any issues dragging such a caravan around. That is perfectly normal in Europe.
Why the Americans think one would need a thick fat pickup or truck just to pull a caravan is beyond me. Maybe it is just smart marketing to make people buy even bigger cars than they ever need.
A quick search shows a civic can tow 1,100 lbs. A dodge caravan can tow 3,600 lbs. An F-150 tows 14,000 lbs.
Now someone may have a legitimate reason to need to tow thousands of pounds, such as someone who moves horses around.
But for normal use, my tool trailer comes in under 1,000kg (2,200 lbs); maybe someone working in a mountainous area would need more power? Most likely marketing.
My parents used to have a 2008 dodge Durango that they were told would be good enough to haul their 3500 lb camper. (Needed 7 seats for 5 kids + them)
This thing did not do well hauling the camper. It struggled going up the mountains where we vacationed and it struggled just as bad coming back down because the brakes couldn't handle the dead weight.
Now us kids have grown up and moved out and they got an F150 that hauls their new camper, about the same weight (3700 lb) like it's not even back there.
I think there's a lot more to it than how much weight the car can actually pull. But I couldn't say since I'm not that knowledgeable.