Do not Lock your Hitch
On Oct.13 we traveled from SC, with our Fleetwood Bounder DP to Dauphin Island in AL with our Saturn Vue in tow. The first day we traveled aprox. 300 miles, stopped in Pine Island overnight. I ran the...
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From my father's experience as property damage appraiser, automatic transmissions heating up enough to ignite the transmission fluid were a fairly common failure mode for towing with wheels down. They could also explode violently enough to throw shrapnel through the firewall or floorpan.
"Safe to tow" is not an absolute, it is relative and probabilistic. The transmission doesn't have to have slipped into gear for a failure like this, it can be just that it was not well enough lubricated to handle the heat generated by towing speed and time. Everything has to go just right, and there are some little things that can go wrong. This is why manufacturers who say "OK" change their recommendations after experience gives them a failure rate they find unacceptable.
"Safe to tow" is not an absolute, it is relative and probabilistic. The transmission doesn't have to have slipped into gear for a failure like this, it can be just that it was not well enough lubricated to handle the heat generated by towing speed and time. Everything has to go just right, and there are some little things that can go wrong. This is why manufacturers who say "OK" change their recommendations after experience gives them a failure rate they find unacceptable.
