Caravan and Motorhome Club Towcar of the Year 2019

Fascinating insight in to towcars and vans. I'm a bit surprised at Bailey and Alko!

As a sufferer of Alko/Bailey axle failure I note that the Unicorn Segovia as towed by the Mercedes is ballasted at 2104Kg  somewhat over the Segovias 1767Kg MTPLM. Now I know this was not on a public road so anything goes. But this would be illegal on public roads!!

3 or 4 of the heavyweight towcars demanded a van ballasted beyond MTPLM

I wonder if these vans get sold on!!!

I'm surprised that they use regular caravans. At work, when we did our towing tests we had caravans made specially for us without any interior fittings except for shelves for ballast. There was one single axle and one twin and both had chassis rated right at the top limit of what one would expect would be towed by a normal car. However, because they had no interior fittings, they had a very low MIRO. Consequently their weight could be adjusted to almost any value to suit the respective towcar. Another advantage of having such custom built caravans is that load distribution inside is also almost infinitely variable, which was useful for tests under varying conditions.

No David, I'm sorry but to only test 35 vehicles is a pretty poor sample and what's more, no they were not all new models. Disappointed to be honest as this does not reflect well on the Club imho

I think it is very difficult to discern what is being tested from the vague summary results published. Looks very subjective. Are they testing the vans ,the cars ,the drivers, the tyres? I guess it is a dynamic test, so isolating the towcar performance alone would need much analysis.

Perhaps this is the one application where a driverless car would help?

It might be more informative to test cars at 70, 85 and 95% weight ratios this might give enough data to objectively assess towing characteristics. Basically a towing vehicle, trailer ,driver etc is a control system, a control systems engineer would never base critical stability or any other assessment on a single data point.

One only has to look at what is monitored on an F1 car even with all that data and analysis problems persist.

IMO To find the best towcar they should test it to the car's maximum towing capacity rather than this outdated 85% figure.

That's right. If a car is good at the limit it would be even better at 85%.

I like to read about tow car of the year, it helps you to think of your next tow car plus listening to people and chat on here. I think its good they have gone on weight instead of price. as I like many other people can not afford new cars. I am pleased that my now car is in there and a winner. but I choose my tow car for my needs . now towing with a touareg the best yet but maybe not as good as my next one?