[quote=RicardOben]With all the cats and all the miles I have towed, it has nothing to do with the size of the cat or the weight of the boat trailer combination (within reason). It is all about the windage of the hulls outside of the slipstream of the car. Same for pontoon boats vs ski boats.
I have towed with a Datsun (old enough to remember Datsun?) 200 SX, mini pick up, mini van (toyota shuttle craft) astro van, full size pick up, suburban etc. All of them will do the job but the more truck you have the better it will tow and the longer the tow vehicle will last. We have seen guys tear up overdrive transmissions from towing in OD and overheating the transmission. If you travel often to regattas and economy and reliability are desired, the astro van was probably the best, you can sleep in it, it does decent on gas and is really a chevy pick up with a different body so it has the capacity to tow the windage. The minivan overheated if we pushed it, the mini pick up would not go up hill in a big wind well. The suburban just did everything well, had two of them and now have an diesel Excursion, do not know the boat is back there with it. Got it to tow the travel trailer.
MPG, WTF, who cares, if you drive 200 miles and you get 10 mpg or 20 mpg the difference is 35 or something bucks. Pretty cheap compared to the fun of sailing. If you store your boat at a place you can put it in the water with anything that has a hitch, we had a guy with a Geo Metro, but he only had to go 2 miles, worked fine.
Mini rant to follow, no one will ever convince me to buy a car for MPG. It never adds up unless you drive a lot and I mean a lot of miles. The difference in annual cost from a car with 20 MPG to 40 MPG will never cover the cost of the car. For example if you have a car that gets 20 you can only spend 1,750 on the car that gets 40 mpg, and that is based on 20k a year and $3.50 a gallon for gas. Most people spend less than $3k a year on fuel and unless you can get the car for cheap it never adds up. A new prius Starts at 24K it would take 8 years to recover the cost of the car and that is driving over 20k a year. So you have to have it as a 3rd car to make it work. JMHO, YMMV (pun intended)
That being said, I do not drive the my Excursion every day, it is big loud and drinks Diesel, so I drive my little coupe that gets 25 or so. I am not immune to the costs of driving but making any vehicle decision based solely on MPG is just not making any sense to me. Richard.[/quote]
