Driving & Technique

Four things change the moment you couple up, and each has a consequence at the wheel. Mass, because you are now accelerating and stopping perhaps twice the weight with the same brakes on the tow vehicle. Length, which changes turns, passing and lane changes. A hinge in the middle, which is what makes reversing counter-intuitive and sway possible at all. And a rear-biased load that lightens the front axle, where your steering lives.

Much of the advice circulating about towing technique is sound but unsourced, and some of it is contradicted by the people who built the vehicle. These guides quote owner's manuals directly and say so when a widely repeated technique turns out not to appear in any of them. General Motors publishes the only following-distance rule we could find from a manufacturer, and it is a multiplier rather than a count of seconds: stay at least twice as far behind as you would without a trailer.

The place this matters most is sway. Three manufacturers — GM, Ford and Jayco — publish nearly the same three-step response: ease off the accelerator gradually, keep steering inputs small, then stop and find the cause. What they disagree about is whether to use the brake controller's manual lever, with a controller maker recommending it for sway and Ford's own manual naming that exact use as misuse. Where manufacturers conflict, these guides show the conflict rather than picking a side quietly.

One theme runs through the whole category and is easy to miss: several driver-assistance features quietly stop covering you when a trailer is attached. Blind-spot detection zones may not extend behind the trailer, rear cross-traffic alert can disable itself entirely, parking aids should be switched off, and the anti-lock system does not control the trailer's brakes at all. Assume the electronics cover the tow vehicle only until you have confirmed otherwise in your own manual.

The sequences here reward learning the order rather than the steps. Hitching, unhitching and parking on a hill all have published orders where the order is the point — chocks take the load before the parking brake is set, chocks go on before anything is disconnected, and the coupler latch opens before the vehicle backs up rather than after.