How to Flat Tow a Jeep Wrangler Behind an RV
We're the Russos:
This is our 2015 Jeep Wrangler Sport Unlimited.
Now there are all kinds of cars on the market
that you can tow behind a motorhome.
The Jeep for us was our preference
because it's very simple to do
and there are a lot of aftermarket accessories
for the Jeep to be flat towed behind a motorhome.
We love this thing and we've towed it
over 15,000 miles miles behind our motorhome.
Today, I'm going to tell you all about how we do that.
First thing is, starting off with the motorhome, truck
any type of vehicle that actually has the
capacity to tow something this large.
Our Jeep weighs in at just around 4,500 pounds
fully-loaded in the back with the tank of fuel
and our motorhome has a 5,000 pound tow capacity
and it tows this just fine.
Now the weight of your Jeep is going to differ between
whether you have the Sport, the Rubicon,
what kind of accessories you put on it.
We actually got a aluminum bumper
to help keep the weight down.
This weighs just about as much as the stock bumper.
The steel bumpers away a lot more.
So that's something to take into consideration.
After you figured out your motorhome's tow capacity
the next component you need to start
looking into is a tow bar.
There are all sorts of tow bars on the market.
We went with the Ready Brute Elite
for a number of reasons that I'll touch on in this video.
But there are a number of other companies
that produce tow bars like Roadmaster, Blue Ox, etc...
You need to find one that has the amount of capacity
to tow a vehicle like this.
The Ready Brute Elite can tow up to 8,000 pounds.
So for us that was perfect.
Now you're tow bar will connect to the motorhome
via the motorhomes hitch receiver
and then you'll have two arms that will
come back to the Jeep
and connect to the Jeep via these brackets.
A lot of people will use base plates for their Jeep.
We chose to go with a fully integrated bumper
from Rock Hard 4x4.
If you want to review on that bumper
or the tow bar were using, we'll link to those videos here.
The bumper is all aluminum.
It has the brackets that are bolted directly
into the frame of the Jeep, which we prefer.
The next thing is to figure out how to stop your Jeep.
For us, with the Ready Brute Elite tow bar,
it's an inertia driven braking system.
Which means when we break the motorhome,
the Jeep will push up against the motorhome and
activate a lever that pulls a cable,
that pulls our break.
So this is directly tied into our brake.
There's no electronics or anything to really go wrong.
There are electronic systems on the market
that you can consider,
but we prefer to go with the inertia driven
mechanical system.
The other thing is, when you're braking,
you need the brake lights and the turn signals to work.
So this cable here is tied into our
light system in the back.
This is a Cool Tech wire harness
and we connect it to the RV via an umbilical cord
that goes from here directly into the
7 pin adapter on the RV.
The final thing on the list is to make sure you have a
heavy-duty set of safety cables that
could hook on to your bumper.
As well as a breakaway system.
That's this little guy down here.
Now, this is really in case something
happens with your tow bar
or the hitch receiver breaks away from the motorhome.
You don't want your Jeep going down the road
without any brakes.
So, the safety cable keeps it connected to the RV,
but if the hitch receiver breaks off
and the safety cables are no longer of any use.
This cable is actually tied into the frame of the RV
and as the jeep is moving away from the RV
it'll pull the brakes, lock those in place
and the Jeep will stop in the middle of the road.
This is a lot better than having your Jeep
going careening down a highway.
There are plenty of stories on the internet
about things like this happening.
And we actually met a couple who were
driving down the road, started to slow down,
and they saw their Jeep passing them on the highway.
Luckily the Jeep went off into the dirt
and they were able to go get it,
but sometimes people aren't that lucky
and the car will go incoming traffic.
You do not want that to happen because you are
responsible for anything that happens with your Jeep.
It's very quick to hook the Jeep up to the tow bar.
Just make sure that once it's hooked up,
you go through all the components and have a checklist
to make sure you haven't forgotten any pins,
all your cables are hooked in right places, etc...
The final part is to put your Jeep in tow mode.
Different Jeeps have different ways of doing this.
So we suggest going through your manual
and reading step-by-step how to do it
as you put your Jeep into mode.
It's very simple to do, but there is a specific sequence
that you have to follow in order to do it correctly.
In closing, once you have a vehicle that can
adequately flat tow your Jeep behind,
it's really about finding the right components
that work for your vehicle in your situation.
We will link to everything we've used to flat tow
our Jeep in the description below.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
If you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up.
Subscribe! And let us know in the comments
what kind of vehicle you tow and how you do it.
Thanks for watching guys. Bye!
How to Flat Tow: Expedition | Ford How-To | Ford
Ford Motor Company:
Review of Towing a Vehicle Behind an RV - etrailer.com
etrailer.com:
Why we Flat Tow with our RV
Where the Streets Wander - Bryan & Luann Street:
- Hi, and welcome to this
week's RV table talk.
We're going to be talking today
about flat towing behind a motorhome.
But before we get started,
let us introduce ourselves.
- Hi, we're Brian and Luann Street
and we're Streets Wander.
That's an RV lifestyle website
that offers education,
inspiration, and encouragement
for the RV life.
- In this episode is brought to you by
The Complete RV Travel Planner.
It's an RV travel planner that's designed
just for RVers and the
way that they travel.
You can find it at RVtravelplanner.com.
So, flat towing behind a motorhome.
What are we going to tell 'em today?
- Well let's talk about
different ways you can do it.
- Okay.
- First of all,
flat towing is referred
to as towing a car,
all four wheels flat on the ground.
- Right, and your car can be called a car,
a truck, a dingy, a toad.
- Right.
Different names for it.
We just call ours a car.
(laughs)
- And toad, they spell it T-O-A-D,
like T-O-W-E-D behind a motorhome.
- And you got dolly,
where you can actually,
a lot of cars can't be flat towed.
You can put the front wheels of your car,
drive up on a dolly.
- I considered that for about,
well I wanted to do it, honestly,
'cause I didn't know any
better in the beginning.
We had a Prius and I
wanted to dolly our Prius
'cause we couldn't flat tow it,
for the gas mileage, because
the Prius was amazing
on gas mileage, and I thought
that would save us money.
I considered it until Brian vetoed it.
- Yeah, we didn't want anything
extra to pull behind us.
Another thing I've seen is a lot of people
can bring trailers.
They put their cars on them.
They put motorcycles on them--
- Right, so.
A flat bed trailer.
- Flat bed,
or even an enclosed one.
- Oh yeah, right, I've seen
those being pulled, yeah.
Double-decker ones sometimes,
with all their toys.
- If you have a lot of
things you want to bring,
a trailer might be an option.
- Let's talk a little bit,
Brian, tell them why we chose to flat tow.
- I think the main reason
about flat towing is we knew
that we have the motorhome.
First of all, we wanted a car
to get out and explore and make our,
we parked an RV in our campsite.
We got our freedom built into that car,
which we love and we do that all the time.
The reason we chose flat towing
is that when we are ready to
go to the next campground,
I didn't want a lot of
packing or hooking up to do.
I wanted something that
we could actually do
in a couple of minutes and be on the road.
- So something that was simpler.
- Simple.
- So flat towing is simpler.
- It is so simple.
I actually, I would like
to do a little video
on how long it actually
takes us to hook up our car,
'cause I really think it
takes us about five minutes.
It could take us a few minutes longer,
I don't know, but it's very fast.
I mean, you drive it up, we hook it up,
and we're going on the road.
- Well, and I think the other
reason we chose to flat tow
was that we didn't want to
have a trailer or a dolly
that once we arrived at a destination,
that you actually have
to store that somewhere,
either in the campsite with you,
and sometimes campsites
aren't all that big.
- No, a lot of campgrounds
you can't even store 'em on your site.
You have to put 'em in a
different parking area.
- Right, and so that would require you
taking your car off, and
then backing that trailer in
using your motorhome to do that,
and then going to your campsite.
We see it done all the time.
There is nothing wrong
with any of those methods.
It's all depends on what you want to do
and how you want to pull
your vehicles with you.
But for us, flat towing was our solution
and we have really enjoyed
having that as an option.
The thing is is that it does
require you to have a car
that you can flat tow.
- Yeah, we talk about
cars for a minute, is that
there are just maybe I
call it a handful of cars
that can be flat towed,
and out of that handful
there's a few that are
probably more fit for it.
There's a list, we'll put that link below.
- There is, in the blog post
that is associated with this video,
there are links in there to
the MotorHome Magazine's
guide to flat towing.
They put one out every year
for the current year's vehicles
that tells you exactly which cars
can and cannot be towed
in that model year,
and you can buy back issues
if you're buying a used car,
you can buy those back
issues for the years
to be able to check out which models
are able to be flat towed.
But I think what you really wanted to say
and what you just said was that
the ones that can be flat towed,
out of those are probably not
ones that are your dream car.
- Well, I was going to mention it.
Obviously most of the cars
you're going to flat tow
are not dream cars, but
they're not meant to be.
They're meant to be something you use
when you get to the campground.
- Right.
- Out of that, I also
referred to the fact that
there are certain cars that require you
to do certain things before you tow them.
- Right, so even if
they can be flat towed,
they may not be as simple as just
hooking up and going.
- As simple as hooking up
and going.
Some, you may have to, after
you pull 'em for so long,
you have to run the car, run the trailer,
whatever is required.
- Right, when you stop
at a rest stop.
- When I are looking
for a flat-towable car,
I veto anything I have to do anything to.
I simply want something I can plug up.
If I want to pull it for three days
and unhook it, that's all I want.
- And then you know that
from the manufacturer
they have determined that you can do this.
It doesn't void your warranty.
It's setup to do it and it has a process
in which you put it into that
mode to be able to tow it.
- Right.
You can find these in the owner's manual.
Most, I'd say probably most
salesmen at a dealership
won't even really know
what we're talking about.
- No, and that's the thing
is they're salesmen, right?
And so you may be looking for a car
that you can flat tow,
and that's why these guides are so great.
And get the link on our blog post
because those guides can really help you
narrow down your search.
In fact, the last time we
went shopping for a car,
we went to CarMax,
because they have a variety
of cars all in one place,
and we were looking used.
We didn't want to buy a new one
to pull behind the motorhome.
So we went there and we picked
out three models to drive,
so we could test drive them all,
and that was really helpful.
We quickly narrowed it
down to what we have today.
And so we're going to talk about that.
So how do we flat tow?
- When we went shopping, we
found the 2015 Jeep Cherokee.
Not the four-wheel drive version.
- It is the four-wheel drive version.
- It's called the Trail Hog.
- Trail Hog, yep.
- And the reason we chose this one,
because it has the transfer case
where you can push a button
and it puts everything in neutral.
- Right, super easy.
It really, really is.
This is our third flat tow
vehicle that we've had.
This one is super easy to
put into the right mode.
It's just a little habit of sequences
that we have to do to get ready to go.
- It has one fault in it that was not,
we didn't know about
actually when we bought it.
- Well we did but, well maybe not.
- We didn't know about it.
- Okay.
- Until after we had the car.
It's got a thing where you have to do
something to the steering to--
- Avoid a death wobble.
- Death wobble.
- They call it that.
Nobody dies when it happens,
but it looks like the car may die
when it actually happens
to you going down the road.
In fact, some other
bloggers that we know about,
actually wrote about theirs.
They didn't know about it either,
and they had to get the extra,
what did we have to put in it?
- There's a special
wiring harness you put in
that actually adds power
back to your steering box
and it eliminates this problem.
We've never had the
problem since we've been--
- Right, we have never
experienced a death wobble.
We don't want to.
- We don't want to.
But, had I had known that
when I had bought the car
I probably wouldn't have bought it.
- Right, so that goes back to--
- It goes back to knowing
more about what you're buying
because I know there's
only one that is really
good out there and
that's the Jeep Wrangler
is really probably one of the best
as far as flat towing, for two reasons.
It tows simple.
And the second reason
is a lot of these cars,
when you're flat towing 'em,
puts a drain on the battery.
And if you have that
drain on your battery,
that can run your battery down very fast.
That happened to us because
our tow harness had a problem.
And we didn't realize that our battery
wasn't charging properly,
and we get there and it's dead.
That's what happened.
Flat towing, get the right vehicle,
is actually, it's simple to hook up.
We won't go back to
doing it any other way.
- No.
- Of course.
- But then what do we hook it to?
What do we have for towing?
- Well, we've used a Blue Ox system.
The reason we choose Blue Ox,
we got Roadmaster's out there,
there's a couple other
manufacturers out there
but I went with Blue Ox
for the reason is that
it's a big company and
I like the baseplate
that you put on the car
that it has the removable pins,
which you can't even
see that it's on the car
once we remove the pins.
- Right, so your car doesn't look like--
- It doesn't look like
it's a flat towed car.
I really like the clean
look of the Blue Ox.
This is a great system,
Roadmaster's a great system,
but I would say if any system
you're thinking of buying,
like, if you later think,
ever think you may possible trade
to a different car, make sure you get one
that builds base plates
for a lot of different cars.
- Yeah, 'cause you do
have to buy a base plate
that's unique to your car,
to your model in your car.
- Right.
- They're not interchangeable.
You can't take the plate
off your current car
and go buy a different
car and put it on there.
So there is an expense to that,
of the whole towing thing,
so be sure that when you're
picking out your car,
of course you can't be sure
that you want it forever.
Clearly, we've had three,
and we've experienced the
cost of it every time.
Don't recommend it.
But if you can try to figure out
which car you want and then
buy all the things for it,
then maybe future models,
when you upgrade to 'em,
to a newer model, it
still may work on that
depending on the model styles and stuff.
- When we went to our Jeep,
we had the Blue Ox tow bar
so basically all I had to
do was buy a base plate
and put it on the car,
and wire it up, we were ready to go.
One other thing, the next
thing we talk about is
you got to have a braking disk,
a supplemented system--
- Supplemental braking system.
- System in that car.
It is required by law
in they say 49 of the 50 states,
but if you're going to
do any type of RVing,
you've got to have it.
And what we're using is the RVibreak.
We've tried Air Gear.
We've tried different breaking systems.
- We've only had two.
Three, no, we've had three.
- We've had three.
- We wrote about that in a blog post, too.
- We wrote about that in a blog post
and I will say that
we've learned from 'em.
Our first one was a big box.
It was very hard to put in.
Matter of fact, she didn't
even want to mess with it
'cause it was so big.
- Well it was very hard
to position, 'cause it was very large.
- Yeah, and we won't
make that mistake again.
And the second one we had in our truck,
we had one that was installed into it.
And we won't make that
mistake again either because
once we sold the truck, obviously,
the system that was in
there wouldn't interchange.
- Right, because if you do
have a baseplate on a car
and you take it off to sell it,
you can sell that baseplate, right?
- Yeah, you could resell it.
- You could resell it,
or it may be a value in your price point
selling that car to another
RVer who wants to flat tow it.
- But your breaking
system, if you choose one
that is small, compact, and
quick and simple to put up,
you can put it in any car you want,
you can take it with you.
It's easy to store.
That's why we chose the RVibrake.
Take a look at that company,
it's a great company.
- And we talk about their
accessories and stuff in our post.
So in the link above, you can find that,
and find out even more information
about everything that we
talked about here today.
So let's recap.
We're towing behind a motorhome.
Today we're talking about flat towing,
and that was the choice that we made
that we didn't want anything
else to part at the campsite.
- We wanted to make sure we
had a simple, quick hookup
and be ready to go.
- Right.
Easy.
- Easy.
We like easy.
- Easy under five minutes.
And then the last thing is
that we have a Blue Ox system,
and we have an RVibrake
and we have a Jeep Cherokee 2015,
and that's how we flat tow.
If you have any questions,
please leave them below
in the comments and let us know
how you tow or the different things
that you've experienced
in your flat towing,
and if you have any other questions,
like maybe you're new to flat towing
and maybe we can help you answer them,
we'd love to communicate
with you that way.
Leave your comments and questions below,
and be sure to check out the blog post
associated with this for all the links
about the equipment that
we used, as well as the--
- There's a whole lot more
information in that post.
- There is, there is.
So thanks for joining us today
for our RV table talk, and
we'll see you next week.
- Take care.
- Bye.
etrailer | Blue Ox Tow Bar Installation - 2012 Jeep Liberty
etrailer.com:
How to Flat-Tow: F-150 and F-150 Raptor | Ford How-To | Ford
Ford Motor Company:
[MUSIC]
Your Ford truck has a feature that allows
you to tow on all four wheels behind an RV
or other vehicle without damaging
the transmission and gear box.
Let me tell you how to use it.
To set up flat tow and
towing a F-150, you'll need to
do a few things differently.
First, press the Start/Stop button,
if equipped,
without pressing the brake pedal.
Next, press the brake pedal, and rotate
the four-wheel drive mode selector switch
to 2H, and
shift the transmission to neutral.
Once you do,
rotate the four-wheel drive switch from
2H to 4L five times within seven seconds.
You'll then get a message in the
instrument cluster indicating that neutral
tow has been enabled and
to leave the transmission in neutral.
If you use an ignition key,
leave the transmission in neutral and
turn the key as far as it will go toward
the off position and leave it there.
To exit out of flat tow mode,
press the Start/Stop button once
without pressing the brake pedal.
Then press and hold the brake pedal and
shift it out of neutral and into park.
You’ll get a message telling you
that neutral tow has been disabled.
It’s that simple.
To set up flat tow for F-150 Raptor,
from inside the truck,
if equipped with the available intelligent
access with push button start/stop,
press the start button without
pressing the brake pedal.
Once you do, press and
hold the brake pedal and
rotate the four-wheel drive switch to 2H
and shift the transmission to neutral.
Now, using the steering wheel controls and
information display, enable neutral tow
by going to settings, advanced settings,
then vehicle, and select neutral tow.
And press and
hold the OK button to initialize it.
You'll get a message in the instrument
cluster indicating that Neutral Tow
has been enabled, and
to leave the transmission in neutral.
Finally, press
the Engine Start/Stop button
one more time without
pressing the brake pedal.
Keep in mind, if you use an ignition key,
leave the transmission in neutral and
turn the ignition switch as far as it
will go toward the off position and
leave it there.
To get out of neutral tow mode,
press the Start/Stop button once
without pressing the brake pedal.
Once you do, press and
hold the brake pedal and
shift it out of neutral and into park.
You'll get a message telling you
that neutral tow has been disabled.
One more thing, any time you open and
close the driver's door, you'll get
this message in your instrument cluster
to reassure you that the vehicle
is in neutral tow mode.
Any questions?
Go to Owner.Ford.com.
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