New 30ft Trailer Towing Experience

bailer6334 wrote:
I'm confused. I was looking at a 2017 Sequoia to pull my 6695lb GVWR TT. I have weighed the tongue and it weighs 770lbs camping ready.

I had to get rid of my Dodge Durango because it only had a 720lb hitch capacity, and I like to have a safety factor when I tow.

When I talked to the Toyota dealer and the customer support people at the factory they told me the hitch weight capacity maximum is 10% of the vehicles GVWR. When you look at the Limited and Platimum specs you see it has a GVWR of 7300lbs max. To me that means the Hitch capacity maximum is onlt 730lbs.

I understand some vehicles manufactures allow for a increase in hitch capacity when using a WDH, however Toyota does not allow the increase.

So how do some folks have in excess of 850lbs on the hitch and feel that its safe? As I say I'm confused.

Bailer, we have the same GD2150RB, and tow it with a 2016 Sequoia SR5. We've only had the TT about 2 months, and taken it out once, about 250 miles round trip. We use a Blue Ox Sway Pro weight distributing hitch and Prodigy 3 brake controller. No problems at all. The Sequoia towed it pretty effortlessly. I weighed our tongue weight at about 650 pounds with the trailer loaded for camping, but no water in any of the tanks. We had the trailer weighed loaded at 5,620 lbs, but it was hitched to the sequoia, so probably need to add the hitch weight to that.

I want to mention that there is no hitch limit mentioned in my Sequoia owner's manual, only the suggestion of keeping the hitch weight to around 10% of the trailer weight. The manual says the max trailer weight for the SR5 is 7,400 lbs, of which 10% is the 740 hitch limit we keep hearing about. The 10% applies to the trailer weight, not the Sequoia weight. I think if you keep the loaded TT to it's max of 6,695 and load it properly, you'll be able to tow it with the Sequoia with no problem.

Finally, I would point out that as far as I have been able to find out, the new Sequoias are built the same as the ones that were rated to tow 10,000 lbs before Toyota signed onto the J2807 'real world towing' standard. So I'm pretty convinced that towing at or near Toyota's current limits probably has some cushion engineered into it. Still, l'm not planning to exceed the current numbers! Good luck.