I just wondered how easy towing becomes when you're really good at it.
I used to tow a caravan years ago, and didn't have a clue about reversing when I started. I eventually worked it out, and could reverse onto pitches etc. However, along the way I got into a few stressful situations, mainly involving driving into tight car parks or dead-ends which weren't obvious even when looking ahead and driving slowly.
I suspect many people tow their caravan from home to a site, keeping to main roads and only stopping at services which have good access and parking.
However, what's possible when you're really experienced (such as the HGV drivers on here)? Do you visit tourist spots en-route and tow without a concern?
I'm thinking about buying another caravan, and spent an afternoon on a 'refresher course' with a trailer instructor who said I'd have no bother. However, I'm still undecided about towing.
I tow well over 10,000 miles a year. Everything from a small 3/4 ton Sankey to a 4000kg dropside flatbed and pretty much everything in between. In fact, the only thing I don't tow very often is a caravan. With experience it becomes second nature and you develop an awareness of where you can and cannot go without really thinking about it. I very rarely take trailers onto campsites, but driving down narrow farm tracks and lanes and reversing through gates and into barns and sheds is something I do a lot and with practice it becomes easy. The main thing is learning to predict what the trailer will do rather than reacting to what it is doing, again, this is something that will come with experience. I have had a few mishaps over the years some through inexperience at first and some through bad luck. My most recent one was on one of my 4 ton trailers. An airline for the brakes parted company with the connector, which immediately caused the brakes on all 3 axles to fully apply at 55 mph and almost put me through the windscreen of my Land Rover and scared the hell out of the driver behind me. I am now confident at towing virtually anything virtually anywhere.
Thanks, Martin. That's encouraging. I think I'd be fairly relaxed about towing, as I do have the experience from years ago when I did tow a caravan the length and breadth of the country, but it would be nice to have the confidence to know I could handle the trickier manouevres. I'd be towing on my own, so wouldn't have any moral support or a second pair of eyes.
I'd be towing with a Defender 90 HT. Are there any tricks to increasing situational awareness - ie knowing how to avoid obstacles when it's difficult to see them, such as when reversing the trailer to the passenger side?
Quote: Originally posted by deejayen on 08/3/2022
Thanks, Martin. That's encouraging. I think I'd be fairly relaxed about towing, as I do have the experience from years ago when I did tow a caravan the length and breadth of the country, but it would be nice to have the confidence to know I could handle the trickier manouevres. I'd be towing on my own, so wouldn't have any moral support or a second pair of eyes.
I'd be towing with a Defender 90 HT. Are there any tricks to increasing situational awareness - ie knowing how to avoid obstacles when it's difficult to see them, such as when reversing the trailer to the passenger side?
Always leave more room than you think you need, especially on the nearside and remember that the trailer follows a different path around corners than the towing vehicle. When turning left at junctions your road position should be to the right of where you would normally position yourself and depending on your outfit length and the angle of the junction you may have to be almost entirely in the next lane over and start your turn a little later. This is where observation is critical, you should be looking in your mirror as you turn and glancing ahead to make sure your path is still clear. As for reversing, as your 90 does not have electric mirrors I would recommend a convex mirror attached to the bottom of your wing mirrors to give a wider view of the back of your trailer, especially with the solid sides of your hardtop. If in doubt, never be embarrassed to ask for someone to guide you. If you are not sure what is behind you when reversing, get out of your vehicle and have a look before you start.
I decided against towing and got a PVC instead that is just under 6m and about 2.4m wide with the wing mirrors out.
Good job too, as I am no good with parking/reversing (cue 6in joke and all that) - I even managed to scrape the side of my new small car while trying to manoeuvre it out of my drive! I blamed it on (a) no side impact warning like the car before it, and (b) there was a parked car opposite my drive and I did not want to hit it.
Before I took delivery of my van, I had a 2h lesson in a similar size van to mine with a company that provides training for HGV drivers. It boosted my confidence about driving a van for certain.
The base van I originally wanted had side impact warning and reverse camera. However, VW could not give me a build date back August 2020, so I bought the closest spec new van I could get hold of in UK instead. It did not have a lot of the features I wanted, so I added as many back as I could, like reversing and parking camera and air conditioning.
The reversing and parking camera is very handy, and helped me a lot. I found out to my cost that it does not beep/make a sound if I got too close to an object, and dented the back step of my van when I reverse her out of my drive the first time, DOH!!!
I would advise attending a manoeuvring course for certain, and to have a reversing/parking camera fitted if at all possible at the back of the car and/or caravan.
Good luck!
DK
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I find towing and reversing our caravan fairly easy, as it it a long one, the shorter they are the tighter they turn in when reversing. When I retired, my local caravan repairer, who rented out caravans for festivals, asked me to do some towing for them, I could do maybe two trips a day of 100 miles each way. Trips into London were interesting, to the V festival.
It is just a case of building up confidence, and trying not to get flustered.
Yes it is. I paid the princely sum of £100 from an MOD auction. The electrics were 24v military so they had to be swapped but I kept the NATO hitch and the brakes needed some attention but it is a very useful small trailer.
deejayen
When I bought our first 68 sprite alpine many many years ago.
I was given some great advice from a very experienced neighbour.
To reverse in a fairly straight line use your mirrors. If the van in the mirror starts to get out of shape slightly to left just pull the steering wheel down on the left and it will correct it. However there is no substitute for professional training.
Chris
------------- if your car could travel at the speed of light and you turned on your lights what would happen?
I was once told that the successful outcome of any trailer reversing manoeuvre is decided before you even select reverse gear… ie positioning and forethought. Very wise words imo
Thanks, Chalkie. Yes, that's what I learnt to do when I was towing.
I didn't seem to have forgotten it either when I did my refresher training, and I didn't have any problems with the other manoeuvres, such as parking into bays marked with cones.
So, I think I'd get on okay, but it's the thought of it all which is putting me off, and worrying about the tricky situations I might find myself in!
Normally a caravan shows up above hedges etc so any cars etc coming the other way in a narrow road just dive into a passing place and wait for you to pass. I have never needed to reverse in a narrow road.
At the isle of Wight once on the C&cc site. There was only one real way in except my wife took me down a very narrow road by a vineyard. Fine, except a bus came towards me and he wasn't reversing. So it was down to me to reverse, luckily enough there was an open 5 bar gate. I was chuffed that I reversed straight in and followed the bus. We then read the directions and took the directions off the sites book. Bless her. How did we manage before Sat Nav
------------- if your car could travel at the speed of light and you turned on your lights what would happen?
Quote: Originally posted by navver on 14/3/2022
Normally a caravan shows up above hedges etc so any cars etc coming the other way in a narrow road just dive into a passing place and wait for you to pass. I have never needed to reverse in a narrow road.
Sadly not always in my experience! I find commercial vehicle drivers pretty good, they understand the difficulties of reversing a big outfit and make allowances, it's the numpty tourist types in smallish cars who are hopeless! No anticipation or concentration on the road ahead, no concept of the width of their cars nor willingness to pull over enough, even if in a passing place.
Met one particular moron who wouldn't (turns out couldn't!) reverse their car back to let me through, really did expect me to reverse blind (no passenger to act as a banksman!) down a narrow lane for probably half a mile or so! I could see the passing place a 100yds behind THEM, and they could almost certainly have seen me coming over the hedges, but they weren't going to budge. Only when traffic started building up behind me did they concede and then they demonstrated they could not reverse their car, took them an age with numerous 'adventures' into the verges/hedges and shunting back and forth before they reached the passing place! Now normally I would have offered to have reversed their car for them as a practical solution, I've done it before when encountering less competent drivers, but I'd long passed the point of wishing to be nice to these people and daren't risk starting on telling them exactly what I thought of them, probably have put their car in the passing place then tossed their keys over the hedge to keep them out of harms way for other road users! Not happy bunny meeting them, people that really shouldn't have a driving license!
I guess it's no different to confidence in driving a solo car, I've know people who even after years of driving are still not confident and find some situations nerve wracking and challenging. I know countless people who just point blank refuse to drive in London, it terrifies them!
I'm generally regarded as a good driver (that's both peers and professional instructor opinion), and have driven a variety of vehicles, Luton Transit probably being the largest, mostly in the chaos of London, so plenty of reasons for many to be less than confident, but I'm not phased by much.
I've towed power boats, car trailers, horse boxes, camping trailers etc. for decades, so plenty of towing experience, but up until I purchased my caravan about 4 years back, had never towed a caravan. Never one to think you are too old or too smart to learn more, I took advantage of the 'Caravan Towing Experience, AND the 'Caravan Reversing Experience' at the NEC Caravan show shortly before I took delivery of my van, really just to see how it compared with previous towing experience, and how rusty I'd got as a few years since I'd towed anything. The reversing experience went pretty well, only comment being I should have used both mirrors more rather than mostly one, but that was more about environment risks than actual manoeuvring accuracy. TBH I'd had plenty of experience reversing boats down often awkward slipways into the water, so the basic skills had been learnt long ago. On the road with the instructor on the Towing Experience, he commended me on my mirror use and road placement particularly, and found no points needing correcting or improvement. The 'Experiences' had served their purpose and I felt pretty smug to be honest, been a while since I'd towed anything but hadn't lost the skills, and learnt that the caravan obscured far more of the road behind you than anything else I'd towed before, but was not much of a challenge, it was a strange car and a big caravan but didn't feel daunting.
Next time anyone commented on my caravan reversing was when the mobile engineer came out to service it at the storage yard, I had to reverse it into the service bay area, and he commented I did it pretty well! That was the first time I'd towed it for about 5 months as just after winter layup. Obviously he encounters a fair few who don't do it well!
Some 4 years down the line now since I acquired the caravan, many thousands of miles under our wheels, and I don't really think too much about towing it. First few miles after picking it up from storage yard and there's a bit of re-familiarisation to the handling/performance differences to the solo car, but almost forget it's there in a way, perhaps more a case of settling in to driving a big articulated outfit with the constraints that brings rather than entirely forgetting it, as you do have to make many allowances for it size wise and cross winds and HGV bow waves give you a gentle reminder it's there. My outfit tows particularly well, so don't really have any great concerns about snaking or any of the other issues like poor car handling that some seem to suffer, so mostly only have to be concerned with 'does it fit'.
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Topic: Confident towing
via mobile 10/3/2022 at 10:46pm
