Tow Dolly VS flat tow

robatthelake wrote:
I’m reasonably mechanically inclined and as such have installed multiple Tow Bars And Baseplates on various vehicles over the last 20 or so years!

I can see that many people are uncomfortable installing their own hardware and that’s alright ,we can’t all be the same.

I have also observed that finding a place to Store a Tow Dolly and the effort involved attaching the Towed vehicle onto those things appears to me to be just as difficult as installing and connecting any Tow Bar!

Now I am reading that they are only reliable for a couple of years !

We had one installed and I installed the second one. We bought the Suzuki Aerio new and took it to the "professionals" to have the tow bar installed. It cost a small fortune, but I thought it was worth it. They had to take the entire front end off of that car to install the base plate. What I didn't realize until later was they only put half the front end back on. They left out the bumper core, no doubt because it would have had to have been modified to fit around the base plate. That meant the front bumper was a hollow piece of plastic. A piece of a tire thrown up from a car in front of me tore most of the front bumper off. Can't imagine what would have happened if we actually hit something substantial. We didn't own that car long...

I installed the base plate on our Ranger. It took a couple of hours but I would do it again. Not nearly as invasive as the Suzuki. I miss the Ranger. It was a great truck.