drsteve wrote:
Well I'm glad somebody knows more than those silly engineers who designed this thing... and it's good that the people you read about on the internet are exceeding the tow ratings without ever having a single problem. I'm sure they too are much smarter than those engineers.
As my post alluded, and is well established, it's not engineers who set the tow ratings on cars and SUV class vehicles, marketing does. They also have to assume a worst case setup, the real world can do much better. The SAE standards coming in will not change that BTW, they only set the maximum that can advertised and they do not prevent marketing from reducing the numbers.
You are trying to give false authority to your opinion by invoking engineering specification into this.