2022 Tucson SEL all wheel drive, the 2.5, 31,000 miles. my brother in law has a 1,050 pound teardrop he never uses and has offered it to me for the rest of the summer, and i would like to take it up the Catalina Highway to Mount Lemmon and then to Flagstaff over labor day.
Hyundai publishes the tow rating for every trim on their site and the number for mine matches the book in the glovebox, and the hybrid and the front drive versions are different numbers, so go look yours up rather than taking a forum's word for it. mine has room for a 1,050 pound trailer with margin. that is not what i am asking about.
what i am asking: how much tongue weight should i be aiming for and how do i measure it without a scale? does Arizona want trailer brakes on something this small? is a bolt on 1.25 inch receiver on a unibody car going to be fine, and does the vehicle rating or the hitch rating govern? and the real question, which is the transmission: 105 degrees, 6,000 feet of climb in 25 miles, and a car that was not designed with towing as its day job.
tongue weight is 10 to 15 percent of the loaded trailer weight and on a short light trailer i would aim for the middle of that, so 120 to 140 pounds on a 1,050 pound teardrop with your gear in it.
measuring it without a trailer scale: put the coupler on a bathroom scale on a stack of blocks at hitch height, level the trailer, read it. if the tongue weight is over what the scale handles, set the coupler on one end of a 2x4, a block under the middle at a third of the length, the scale under the other end, and multiply. the trick is in every towing book and it works.
and a thing people do not expect: where the battery and the water tank sit on a teardrop moves tongue weight a lot. my Escape is rated 1,500 and the real limit on these cars is never the pulling, it is stopping and heat.
i tow a 1,400 pound utility trailer with the Forester a few times a year over Santiam Pass, so, the mountain part.
climbing is not the problem. the car will climb, slowly, loud, at 45 in third, and the transmission temperature goes up and stabilizes. descending is the problem. use the manual or low range, pick a gear that holds you at 40 to 45 on a 6 percent grade, and only touch the brakes for corners. if you ride the brakes down the Catalina Highway you will cook them, and the smell will tell you about it a long time before the pedal does.
buy a 20 dollar OBD2 dongle and an app that reads transmission fluid temperature. your dash does not show it and it is the only number that matters on a climb like that. knowing it is 215 and steady is completely different from guessing.
on the hitch: a bolt on class 1 or class 3 receiver on a unibody car bolts to reinforced points in the frame rails and is fine for what the vehicle is rated to pull. the hitch's own rating is a ceiling, not a license. the lower of the two numbers always governs, which in your case is the car, and that does not change because the receiver says 3,500.
Arizona's requirement is on the trailer's weight and the threshold is well above a teardrop, so brakes are not a legal question for you. they are still a nice thing to have on a grade and nobody regrets them.
the one maintenance item: if you tow in that kind of heat, cut the transmission fluid interval in half against the book, whatever the book says. the fluid is the consumable in a towing conversation and it is cheap next to the thing it protects. your 2.5 has a conventional eight speed with a torque converter, which is the right gearbox for this and the one that cares most about heat.
did it. Catalina Highway on sunday morning, 7 am start to beat the heat, which was 94 at the bottom and 71 at Summerhaven.
tongue weight came out 128 pounds on the bathroom scale with my cooler and two water jugs in it, so right in the middle. transmission temp on the dongle peaked at 221 climbing out of the first set of switchbacks, sat at 212 for most of it, and came back to 190 within ten minutes at the top. 14.8 mpg for the round trip, which is less than half what the car normally does and about what i expected.
coming down i sat in third at 40 like you said and touched the brakes maybe a dozen times in 25 miles. monsoon cell came through while we were up there and dumped for 40 minutes, so we sat in the car and ate sandwiches and watched a guy with a travel trailer try to turn around in the Palisades lot.
decision made on the other thing: i was going to buy a 5x8 enclosed cargo trailer and that is off. empty they are 1,900 pounds and by the time there is anything in it i am over my number, and now that i have felt what 1,050 pounds does to this car on a grade i am not interested in finding the edge.
late to this but here is the other side of it, which is me being the warning.
i pulled a 1,400 pound aluminum boat and trailer with the Rogue for two summers to Dauphin Island, about 40 miles each way, flat as a table. the Rogue is rated 1,000 pounds. i told myself flat ground and short trips made the number not count.
the CVT started shuddering off the line in the second summer and a transmission shop told me what i already knew. a fluid change settled it down and 60,000 miles later it still shifts, so i got away with it, but i do not recommend getting away with things on a part you cannot buy for under 4,000 dollars. you are inside your number with the teardrop. stay there.
