The dealers do not have crystal balls.

chr$ wrote:

seaeagle2 wrote:
When I bought my used F150, I was towing a 18 foot boat, and not intending to tow a TT (I didn't have a crystal ball either). Turns out, my truck doesn't have the tow package so it has a 5000 lb tow capacity. After posting a question on this website and having someone post a link to a trailer that would fit our needs, (under 5000 lbs with an oven, a Chalet Takena 1860 or 1860BH), we started looking to see if something else more readily available would fit the bill. Knowing the 5000 lb limit of our truck, the first thing we would tell the salesman was that our truck would tow 5000 lbs. The responses we got varied from "You need to buy a new truck before you can buy a trailer", to "Ahh, you're good for 7500 easy", "Those ratings have some fudge factor built in". Of 7 different salespeople at different dealers, 2 did actually listen and, say "well, lets look at what we've got that you can tow". So while I agree on the customer doing due diligence to know what they can tow, the average salesman, at least in my experience, doesn't really care......

It's interesting that your 2010 F150 4.6 3V is only rated for 5,000#. My 2009 Explorer Sport Trac 4.6 3V is rated for 6,900#. Must have something to do with overall weight of both rigs? The Sport Trac weighs in around 4,500#.

Its a little footnote buried at the beginning of the towing section, "If you vehicle is not equipted with a tow package, your vehicle is limited to 5000lbs towing capacity". If you don't see that the other note that's easy to miss is the one that notes that the tow capacities listed in the chart are for the max tow package, not the regular tow package. My truck was a Canadian market XLT so even though its an XLT it doesn't have the in bumper fog lights and has a note on the door sticker "not for sale in USA".... I guess once it's used, that doesn't matter, it was built at Dearborn.