As someone who had my electric brakes fail once hauling 1 horse in my 2H BP and my truck was a new F-250 I can tell you that stopping was not easy.
No way would I ever tow with a light vehicle. It may be ok until it isn’t.
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If you’re part of that shiteventer Facebook page, a dually truck pulling a 3 horse bumper pull got flung into a ditch because a front tire blew.
A big truck won’t save you.
You have to drive with brains, and keep up on maintenance.
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Our F350 diesel had just had a complete brake job… daughter was hauling horse and the vacuum pump failed… a $45 item… the brakes were nearly nothing without the boost from the vacuum pump…she was able to get it to stop on the exit ramp.
Talked to the shop owner afterwards, they added vacuum pump replacement to diesel engine brake jobs
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Truly this. Perhaps your average trailers are bigger over there too…but I used to tow a basic 2 horse straight load with a Subaru Forester. Only a single small horse inside, but provided everything is within spec etc it actually is ok.
One of the most common towing vehicles over here weighs just over 4000lbs. Plenty of others that are smaller and we all do just fine. Most people own varying sizes of 2 or 3 horse bumper pulls. Everything is required to have electric brakes on the trailer, with the controller accessible in the cab.
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Even with routine maintenance and checking things over before every use, mechanical things do fail. No amount of “driving with brains” is going to make a lightweight vehicle stop a heavily loaded trailer easy or doable.
Just my personal preference to use a vehicle made to haul. You can do what you like.
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A big truck might not save you, but I would much rather have a longer wheel base, and more weight in my tow vehicle in the event of a wreck. I have no regrets about choosing the biggest tow vehicle I can afford, with as many tires as possible.
I have towed with everything from an Ford F-150 to a cab and chassis RAM 3500, and anything in between. I will always err on the side of caution, and in this case bigger is better.
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I don’t disagree. But it’s not feasible for many to afford that gigantic pickup - they have to make due with what they’ve got. It is more than possible to tow safely with a smaller vehicle. It’s done worldwide - just Americans think the ginormous tow vehicle is a “need” instead of “want”.
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It’s mine too, as a have a pickup dedicated to hauling.
Not everyone can afford that though. A 2 horse trailer is really not outrageously heavy. If it falls within the tow specs of the vehicle (and in this case, with a large margin!) then it’s more than doable.
The driving with sense goes with any towing scenario, big or small.
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“if it falls within tow specs” is a misleading. A lot of truck and trailer combos max out the tow vehicle’s GVWR or tongue weight specs before ever getting anywhere close to the tow rating. It’s important to run all the numbers.
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I think it’s really funny that on the Horse and Hound forum today, someone asked, “Can I tow with a Skoda Yeti?” And everyone went, “Of course you can tow with a Skoda Yeti so long as the trailer + payload = within the vehicle’s capacity” (2100kg for the 4x4 and 2.0 diesel, by the way).
Whereas on this forum, people are questioning whether or not you need a bloody Range Rover, or if you really, really need that F-250 for a small two horse bumper pull. As an American expat who now lives in Britain and once owned an F-250 (sniff… I loved that truck), I used to believe you could not possibly tow a horse without a megatruck, but I have accepted that if I ever do buy a trailer, I will be towing it with a Skoda Yeti.
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I will note that European trailers have significantly lower tongue weights than US trailers, which is also an important factor in broadening the range of tow vehicles that can pull them. But I agree that people on this forum are a bit irrational about tow vehicles. I ended up with a Toyota Tacoma to pull my Bockmann because I decided a truck was going to be much more useful to me for a variety of reasons than a small SUV. But there are numerous small SUVs that would be absolutely fine for towing it.
Your picture of the Skoda Yeti made me laugh. This is my favorite picture of my trailer. It was the day I picked the trailer up, I have never actually taken my horse kayaking.
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My Yeti is a lovely wee car. It’s a shame you guys can’t buy Skodas.
It turns out that every day is a school day. I was chatting about this thread to my OH, and he pointed out that the allowable tow weights in the US are different from the allowable tow weights in the UK/EU, for identical vehicles. “What?” I said, thinking that’s surely something the car manufacturers decide based on the spec of the vehicle. But no, he was right. I looked up the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV 2.4 petrol – because OH owns one and it is sold in both the States and Europe – and we can happily tow up to 3500lbs (really 1600kgs). However, if we lived in the States, our Outlander would only be allowed to tow 1500lbs. Doesn’t matter if you have an Equi-Trek or Ifor Williams or any trailer designed to be pulled by a small SUV. OH is on an Outlander Facebook group (like all the cool people), and apparently American Outlander owners were saddened to learn that their European counterparts could actually tow things like big caravans and ponies with their cars – that’s how he knew this.
So there’s that. Makes you wonder about the influence of the American car manufacturers’ lobbyists, huh. If anything, American roads are usually easier to drive on than UK ones.
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You have a 55mph speed limit for towing a horse trailer, I believe?
Compare that to the folks doing 90mph on the freeway over mountain passes around here.
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Great Britain is “When towing a trailer you are restricted to a maximum speed of 50mph on single carriageway roads, and 60mph on dual carriageways and motorways . You are not allowed to use the outside lane of a three or more lane motorway when towing, (except where there are lane closures).”
Most of the continent is 50 or less
I know here it is not uncommon for rigs to be running 75MPH or faster
Distance of travel is an issue, TEN European countries could be fit into Texas alone. (or ALL of Great Britain 2.8 times)
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I do think people really forget how big the United States really is. From Los Angeles to New York City is about 2790 miles. Shreveport Louisanna to El Paso Texas (basically crossing texas) is 873 miles. There is also topography to consider. Between the appalachians and the rockies it is essentially flat. However, if you are traveling the east coast and west coast, you deal with a lot of mountains. I know traveling here in Virginia, its very hill to mountains in the west part of the state.
London, via the chunnel, to Moscow is 1,790 miles. Stockholm to Madrid is about 1900 miles. The topography is also different. In England, essentially flat except for Scotland in the north and Wales in the east. In Europe, you have the Alps and the Pyranees. North of them the EU is essentially flat and south of them essentially water. So if you are trailer to events in England its never that far. London to glasgow is only 412 miles of mostly flat land.
I’ll be hauling a horse this week to Aiken and that is 460 miles and I have to cross some mountains. I wouldn’t want to do that in an SUV even if I’m pulling a lightweight trailer. As it is, my trailer (Hawk with a dressing room) with one horse up will be over 5000 lbs. Coming down a steep mountain grade, I don’t want the trailer to be able to overpower the truck.
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But many people in the US never haul their horses more than a couple of hours or across mountains. The point is that, depending on the situation, you don’t always need a huge truck to haul a 2 horse bumper pull trailer. However, when people come on COTH to ask about tow vehicles, folks rarely ask what type of hauling the poster is actually planning to do before immediately saying that they should never consider hauling with anything less than an F-250.
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@Gardenhorse this! This thread has gone completely off topic. I was pretty clear it was for local use only. Realistically I would probably not be towing more then 20miles and less then a dozen times of year.
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My best towing vehicle was a Chevy Tahoe. I’ve pulled that same trailer with a Chevy 2500 & 1500 and a dodge 1500. The Tahoe I forgot I was towing anything behind because it never felt like I was. With the trucks you alway knew you had a trailer. Now I dragged my trailer everywhere from Kentucky to indoors on the east coast. You can pull a trailer with a Range Rover. Driver conservatively and you’ll be fine.
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So many vehicles now have the tow capability when it comes to weight, but one thing that the dealers often don’t understand is that horses are a “live” load. You can’t strap them down so absolutely nothing moves. That’s where horse trailers get into trouble sometimes - horses shift and lean on the back of the trailer, you have to swerve, because let’s be realistic, no matter how careful you drive, it’s the other idiots on the road that make you have to do quick maneuvers. The shift of anywhere from 700lbs to 2000lbs absolutely will move the trailer around against your will.
For me, it’s more about the stability of the longer wheel base than whether it is a giant pickup truck.
For OP, were I to go with a Land Rover, I’d want a lighter, smaller euro style trailer to go with it, rather than the monster two horse with a 4ft dressing room that is so common here in the states.
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Who hauls at 90mph? Not me, when I was hauling. I doubt I went much over 60mph when hauling a horse in a two horse bumper pull with an F-250. Also, I recall lots of states having 65mph speed limits, even on straight motorways in the middle of nowhere. Not that people followed that…
The motorway speed limit for normal non-commercial vehicles is 70mph in Britain, but like everywhere else in the world, there are plenty of twats doing 90.
I’m also aware that the US is big. Really big. My horse travelled from Colorado to Massachusetts, then did the reverse journey four years later. I paid commercial shippers to take her and hauled an empty trailer across the country. If you’re taking your horses on those sorts of journeys regularly, then having a large rig makes sense. I agree with that. Same as if you’re travelling from Glasgow to Kent regularly. People who do that sort of thing here (serious competition riders) generally have 7.5t trucks, or bigger, since the gooseneck + megatruck doesn’t exist. If you’re pottering around to local shows and trails, then you can safely get away with a Range Rover and an Equi-Trek.
I also know how far it is to London and if I were doing that frequently (can’t think of much worse things…those English motorways south of Preston are traffic-jammed holes of suffering), I would use a 3.5t lorry, not an SUV and trailer.
So pretty much what Gardenhorse said. It depends on what kind of hauling you’re doing.
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