Heart troubles

4 February 2019

I almost had a heart attack last night.

I decided to pull the manual for the tug (still looking for a name) and check all the weights.

Big mistake.

The first weight I found was the Drawbar load (or tow ball weight)^[1]. It said:

The maximum permitted weight exerted by the trailer drawbar on the ball coupling of the towing bracket must not exceed 140 kg (308 lbs).
Volkswagen; Owners manual; Touareg; Edition 11.2010; page 153

F***ing hell! What? 140 kg? A mild panic ensued, followed by slight nausea and a pounding in my chest.

Just kidding…

But it was concerning. So I went on a google frenzy. Thankfully, this proved fruitful. Multiple, reliable sources indicated that the Australian tow ball limit is indeed 280 kg. Sources included car magazines that tested the vehicle at launch, and Club Touareg. Club Touareg went further and explicitly stated that the 140 kg specified in the manual is for the VW standard tow ball as delivered in Europe. The EU version is an electrically deployable/retractable tow ball suited for the much lighter tow ball weights common in Europe. The Australia/NZ tow bar is a very different design and typically rated for 350 kg, even if the car is limited to 280.

Whew!

This was the number we saw everywhere before deciding on this vehicle. Looking more closely at the manual, it clearly states at the top that this information doesn’t apply in the USA and Canada. They should have added Australia and New Zealand to that list. Even if limited to Europe, it makes no sense that a vehicle capable of towing 3,500 kg can only take 140 kg on the tow ball… but I’ll leave that to European owners to sort out. Perhaps they can source a stronger bar – like those sold here – to increase that figure.

So after I recovered, I went looking for the other weights.

GCM: Gross Combination Mass

The GCM^[2] was the number I was actually somewhat concerned about as we found it to be elusive when we were hunting for a car. Even the local VW dealer couldn’t tell us. What we had found, suggested 6,340 kg as the number for this important limit.

So flipping through the pages on towing, I first came across the Maximum permitted trailer weights, which were – as expected – 750 kg unbraked and 3,500 kg braked for all Touareg models.

Then, on the next page was the Maximum permitted gross combination weight… Hooray! It turns out the 6,340 kg value was correct, for the 206 kW petrol engine. Our engine, the 176 kW diesel, has a GCM of 6,400 kg, and further, because ours is the 4xMOTION version – as opposed to the standard 4MOTION – it is increased slightly to 6,450 kg. I can only assume that some part of the powertrain must be beefed up slightly to handle the low range settings, but it is consumed by the added weigh of this system, so it’s a wash.

GVM: Gross Vehicle Mass

The final numbers I wanted to see are the GVM^[3] and also the maximum loads for each axle. These were found in a different section of the manual that dealt with the weight of the vehicle and was unrelated to towing. Our GVM is 2,910 kg with 1,420 kg allowed on the front axle and 1,540 kg on the rear.

The upper end of our possible kerb weight (which include driver, fluids, spare and a 90% filled fuel tank) is 2,505 kg, giving us a minimum payload of 405 kg. Take off the tow ball weight of (up to) 280 kg and our real payload is 115 kg, but we’ll have to do a proper weigh in at some point, as the kerb weight range given is as low as 2,229 kg, potentially giving us an extra 276 kg. I suspect we will be somewhere in the middle, perhaps towards that lower number, as we don’t have many option packs added. The glass sunroof alone apparently adds around 100 kg to the vehicle weight. This is the main reason we didn’t want one.

So it all looks good on the weights front.

^[1] TBD (Tow Bar Download): also called Tow Ball Weight, this is weight that the caravan exerts on the tow ball or hitch of the tow vehicle.

^[2] GCM (Gross Combination Mass): this is the total allowable combined weight of tow vehicle and caravan.

^[3] GVM (Gross Vehicle Mass): This is the total allowable weight of the tow vehicle and includes all passengers, payload and tow ball download.