1ST SGT. ROBERT JENKINS
2nd Battalion, 199th Regiment (RTI)
Camp Beauregard, Louisiana

Towing a trailer can be dangerous if you don’t understand how the added weight and length can affect your vehicle’s handling. I was towing trailers not long after I first started driving. At that time, I had no idea what a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combined weight rating even was. As a young person, I just assumed you hooked the trailer to a truck, jumped in and took off. It wasn’t till several years later that I realized how wrong I’d been.

In 2007, my wife and I decided to buy our first camper. It was during this time I started learning what GVWR and GCWR actually meant, and that my half-ton 2006 Dodge Ram 1500 Mega Cab truck was fine for towing a 29-foot bumper-pull camper. By 2010, however, we had our sights set on larger camper. Unfortunately, my truck wasn’t sufficient to tow a fifth-wheel camper, so I purchased a 2010 Dodge 3500 dually with a Cummins diesel engine.

Now that I had a proper vehicle to tow it, it was time to start looking for a new camper. Soon, we bought a Fuzion 42-foot triple-axle toy hauler. Our bumper-pull had never intimidated me, but this new camper had me scared — and not only because of the length. It was also 13 feet tall and weighed 16,000 pounds. Because I was nervous about towing something so big, I had a friend go with me when I went to pick it up at the dealership.

After the purchase, we were ready to hit the road. We took many trips, towing the camper thousands of miles. After a few years, I got rid of the 2010 Dodge and bought a new 2013 Ram 3500 dually that had a combined truck and towing capacity of 38,000 pounds. I was now very comfortable pulling this camper and had checklists I would go through while performing my before, during and after checks. We had never had an issue on the road until July 2015. Here’s what happened.

After a week at an RV park, it was time to head home. The morning we left, I made the mistake of not checking the air pressure in all six tires on the camper. For some reason it just slipped my mind. About three hours into the trip home, we had a blowout on the camper. Having a blowout at 65 mph can be nerve wracking; but when you have a combined length of almost 60 feet and a weight of more than 26,000 pounds, it’s terrifying.

Fortunately, there was a gravel lot up ahead that I could pull in to and put on a spare. Afterward, I checked the other tires and noticed one looked like it had a knot on it. My wife started looking for a nearby tire dealership and found one just 10 miles away. There I had six new tires put on the camper. We then got back on the road and made it home without further incident.

I don’t know if checking the air pressure that morning would have prevented a blowout. Regardless, it was still a silly mental mistake. If I had been inexperienced towing trailers, panicked when the tire blew, or been driving with a vehicle that wasn’t properly rated to pull a camper that big, my wife and I may not have been as lucky.  

FYI

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a comprehensive guide to towing campers, boats and trailers — including information on gross vehicle weight ratings and safety checklists — on its website at www.nhtsa.gov.

Did You Know?

The gross vehicle weight rating is the manufacturer’s specified maximum operating weight of a vehicle, including passengers and cargo. The GVWR does not include towed items such as trailers, boats and campers. The gross combination weight rating is the maximum combined weight of the towing vehicle, its passengers and cargo, as well as the weight of trailer, boat or camper being towed and its cargo. To find out a vehicle’s CVWR and GCWR, check the owner’s manual or contact a local dealership.