#towing

Making sure that your trailer is properly prepared can mean the difference between life and death for the family in the minivan behind you.

What should you do if a regular Tahoe isn’t enough, but the Cadillac Escalade is a bit over the top?

Trucks are big profit generators for automakers. The half-ton and heavy-duty pickup segments are probably the most fiercely competitive categories in the industry. Brands fight tooth and nail for every sale they can make. To move the metal they’re willing to leverage any and every competitive advantage no matter how small. Not surprisingly this winner-take-all mentality is delaying common-sense reform that benefits truck buyers.

Ford, Chrysler and General Motors make big business out of light-duty pickup trucks, but they ignore agreed-upon test procedures to measure and standardize towing capacities.

A Toyota Tundra will still tow the space shuttle Endeavour, but on a different day and in a different location.

Heavy-Duty pickups were designed for abuse. And in order to see just how much they can handle, website Pickup Trucks.com put together it’s Heavy-Duty Hurt Locker Comparison test.

The idea was to pit the latest H-D offerings from Ford, General Motors and Ram (in this case the F-350 Super Duty, Sierra HD 3500 and Ram HD 3500) in a series of extreme towing tests, covering a distance of some 2,200 miles across the American West . The tests included navigating some of steepest grades in the country in some of the most extreme climates, hauling fifth-wheel gooseneck trailers of some 19,400 lbs behind each truck.

And when the dust finally settled, the GMC Sierra HD 3500 was judged the overall winner. “The GMC Sierra led with best-in-class performance, with wins in almost every test we put the trucks through,” declared Pickup Trucks.com’s editor Mike Levine.

GM engineers have instigated some changes on the 2012 model Sierra and Silverado HD, in order to improve towing capability; these include reinforced pickup box sills, stronger rear springs and box mounts and revised suspension tuning.

The result is an increase of some 2000 lbs in tow rating capacity, which now stands at an impressive 23,000 lbs. To see how the Sierra performed against its chief rivals in the Heavy Duty Hurt Locker test, watch the video below.

Hit the jump to see the video

T&J management filed the suit, which strangely includes an exact dollar amount (libel suits rarely specify a figure), citing loss of revenue, which brings up to two points:

First, it a company really loses $750,000 in two months because of a Facebook Group, then every time a business screws with anyone, you should start a Facebook Group for (or against) that cause.

Second, towing companies are one of the few industries with totally involuntary customers. Sure, you “may” have to park illegally first in order to deal with a tow company, but how often is your car on a tow truck because you want it to be? Odds are, never. So why would a bunch of people talking smack on the internet have anything to do with loss of revenue? As long as the owners of those lots, the people requesting cars get towed are happy, why would the “victims” complaining about it cause loss of revenue?

As a legal professor explains in the video below, T&J has to prove that the libelous statements originated from Kurtz and that they aren’t true in order to win this case, but they probably just want to scare people away from talking smack on the internet, showing that they aren’t afraid to sue you for it.

[Source: Autoblog]