A suggestion for a reasonable range of pin weight or tongue weight would help many folks.

10%-15% on GVW of the trailer

20% - 25% on GVW of a 5th wheel.,

A brief explanation from GDRV that payload is the typical limiting factor and to look at the yellow tag in the door jamb of a truck to make the proper determination. Nobody camps at the advertised payload of an unloaded rig with no propane, batteries or water. Yet many buy them based on these numbers.

Truck manufacturers also need to clean this up where some will advertise huge tow capacities where this will never be met due to the limiting factors of payload.

Jim

Three comments:

1. While it would be nice to see more realistic pin/tongue weights in the literature I wouldn’t expect any company to put itself in a competitive disadvantage. A competitors and salesman dream come true, “you can pull our unit with a SRW or a 3/4 ton, those GD units will require a bigger truck than you have.”

2. It is hard to tell how the owner will load and use their unit. Example our 397TH pin weight was significantly over the published specs. Why? It is a toy hauler, our toys were two bicycles. Nothing in the back to take weight off the pin.

3. The percentages for tongue and pin weights should be viewed as reasonable minimums, not ideals or maximums. Assuming the tow vehicle can handle the weight nothing bad happens with a lot of weight on the tongue or pin. Unfortunately this opposite is rather scary.

Can we add in the makers of hitches?
My 20,000# hitch has a puck system with a rating less than the hitch....
But our trailer fully loaded is less than the puck system limitations.
By sheer luck as I didn't know the puck system was less than the hitch until I read the fine print after installing it!
They don't tell you this when doing research on all these things.

Bought the RV, then the truck, then the hitch..... I hold a Class A CDL with several endorsements, grew up around freight, gravel, and lowboys and am the fleet manager for a medium sized construction company and STILL have a hard time following all the information to a correct conclusion!
FYI - made 4 trips across several different scales bare pickup full of fuel and hitch installed, trailer with & without all our gear, before & after inflating airbags, measured ride height front & rear and recorded axle loadings on individual axles before I felt comfortable that I had things nailed down on hauling our 3740BH correctly.
(yes, 4 scales loaded, unloaded, and air bags on each of them and have an Excel spreadsheet with the information to help me keep things loaded correctly - I'm that intent on NOT being on someone's YouTube video!)
Chris

A couple items come to mind....

Vehicle sales person " tow capacity on this vehicle is 9000#", this is not enough information.

RV sales person " what are you towing with ? , oh a diesel you can tow anything on my lot" , I heard this one at a dealer while shopping.

Another issue is some folks already have the vehicle and try to justify that it is capable to handle what ever they have there eyes set on , think keeping up with the Jones's.

Brian

Brian,

Your right. Many salespeople will sell you anything. Our sales guy was very helpful but he too based our towing on a sheet that showed max tow ratings only. I took 80% of this value as the working number on max tow and this put the payload in a reasonable range for my truck.

Jim

When I purchased my last two rigs from Lazy Days in Tucson I found it enlightening and encouraging that they were very proactive in making sure the TV would handle the RV. They had a worksheet that the salesman had to fill out before trying to make a sale. They actually walked out to the TV, and recorded the GAWR, Payload and GVWR. Then, they calculated how much cargo, and tongue or pin weight they had to work with. Kudos to them. If all dealerships did this, you'd see very few serious overload situations.

Jim

This is most definitely refreshing. The dealer we bought from had a form for the salesperson to fill out but it only had the towing capacity listed on it....

I understand they want to make a sale but from a customer perspective, I'd be just as happy in a slightly smaller trailer with my original truck. Maybe these dealers are part owners in the local truck dealerships