Stopping at Rivington Pike services for a coffee. All 38 foot 6 inches of outfit.

Our Freelander is now becoming a grand old lady of 10 years vintage, we have owned her from new and she’s just passed the 90,000 miles mark so we thought it might be time to retire her from towing duty. However we intend keeping her and started to look round for a suitable replacement to take on the task of towing the caravan. As at some point in the future we hope to move up to a twin axle, twin bed caravan I started looking for a vehicle that would be capable of towing what we hope to move towards in the future.

Now, this is my (our) thoughts and the rational for our eventual choice. It may not be perfect for you or even close to perfect, but this is what we considered in our choices and hopefully going through the process will help you now or in the future when you come to start thinking about a new tow vehicle.

There are lots of options and styles and we needed to narrow down the list quite a bit before getting into the detail. I did read all the reviews from the last “Tow Car of The Year Awards” to see what was being considered by the industry as the top performers, but in some respects the awards are slightly tilted in my opinion as they only review vehicles that have been put forward by the various manufacturers…. which I guess is a marketing tool for them. So there are some vehicles that are not in the awards that should be considered.

Types

We have always had 4 x 4’s as our main vehicle, with an eclectic mix of second vehicles, sports cars, saloon cars etc. Personally we don’t think a saloon or estate type vehicle, even a 4 x 4 version would be right for us. This narrowed it down to SUV type 4 x 4’s and 4 x 4 pickups.

We have nearly always had a Land Rover in the family, I passed my test in one back in 1978 and was quite used to them. Sue had been driving one for longer than she will admit to… both Discovery’s and Freelander’s. The only thing neither of us had any experience of owning was a pickup style vehicle.

4 x 4’s – Choosing a body type

So we are now down to SUV’s and Pickup’s. We very seriously looked at what we needed or thought we might need.

Currently we have a roll out Fiamma Awning, but this might change so we thought about what we would do with a wet awning when packing up… not wanting to put it in the caravan. We also thought about our bikes, we don’t take them with us on every trip, but on some occasions that we hadn’t we wished we had. The ability to take them easily on every trip was a requirement. We didn’t want to carry them on the roof though, so a rear mount on the vehicle was a must. Currently they hang off the back of the Freelander’s spare wheel and it didn’t interfere with towing the caravan and was fairly easy to load and unload. The idea of lifting them on and off a roof mount didn’t appeal to me.

We have a few things that live in the caravan – levelling blocks, corner steady blocks etc that I’d like to carry in the vehicle, and the Cadac, sometimes we don’t take it due to lack of space in our current vehicle (I hate carrying things on the back seat).

Ease of loading – it’s an art loading up any tow vehicle packing everything in so it doesn’t rattle or move about and is safe, so a rear load area that is bigger than our Freelander was a must. We actually think we are pretty slick when it comes to loading as everything is in stackable “Really Useful Box Company’ boxes.

We naturally started looking at 4 x 4 SUV type vehicles – it’s what we know most about and again being big users and fans of the Green Oval, started looking at Landy’s. Now here’s the thing, at the Land Rover dealers…. as we got out of the Freelander… my wallet went off on its own ordered a coffee and a Panini, sat down and said “no way dude”. The wallet was right. The cost of purchasing, yearly servicing and maintenance of one of the Green Oval products was giving my wallet cardiac arrhythmia. Although it may have topped the tow awards for years, it wasn’t an option for us cost wise.

OK, so what else was there similar to a Land Rover? I listed on a spreadsheet all the alternatives and proceeded to wade through them over the next couple of months.

What you have to be aware of is we started this process over 12 months ago, so I’m compressing the time scale down quite a bit.

From the spreadsheet I whittled it down to engine size, towing capacity, Gross Train Weight, Hitch weight limits, braked trailer limits, serving costs, purchase price, wheel base and rear axle to tow ball length, width, height, cost of tower and electrics…. you name it, it was included on the spread sheet. Eventually I came out with the top three contenders… well on paper at least.

Automatic or Manual Transmission

The final choice was whether to go manual or automatic for the transmission. As much as I like manual transmission for 4 x 4 off road capabilities, we weren’t going to be doing a lot of green lane off roading and automatic was the obvious sensible choice.

So with my spreadsheet stuffed full of info, boxes ticked, lists of suppliers for racks and odds and ends then next task was to visit dealers to push, pull, prod, open, shut, question and test drive my (our) top choices.

Job done.

A few days later, while driving to work at silly o’clock in the morning (about 4:45 am actually, I do remember it well ) my careful cogitations unravelled in spectacular fashion.