I'm looking at purchasing a Journey LTD with tow, but it is rated at only 2500 lbs capacity. What steps will I have to take to up the capacity to 3200 lbs. Its an AWD vehicle.


Thanks

 

If the vehicle is rated to tow 2500 lbs, theres not much you can do to increase that. Many factors involved in determining towing capacity. Not to mention if you did tow more than the rated capacity and something were to happen, warranty would not cover it. Your better off looking at something else that can meet tyour towing capacity. Moving to the Journey section.

 

Actually from what I've figured out it's not that you can't tow over 2,500lb it's that you shouldn't go over the CGVW. Here is an example using the numbers for my Journey.

Curb weight with full fuel tanks is 4,040lb. The GCWR is 7,300lbs. So if you subtract the curb weight from the GCWR you get 3,260lb to work with. So if you weighed 0 then you could tow 3,260 without going over the GCWR. If you weigh 260lb then you can tow 3,000lb.

The current journey are rated at 2,500lb so subtract that from the difference between curb and GCWR, in may case 3,260lb, and you get 760lbs which is the max weight of passengers and any cargo you can carry while towing a 2,500lb trailer.

How does this help? As an example, in our case when we get our motorhome if we pulled an enclosed trailer for the journey the trailer could weigh more than 2,500lb and still be safe for the Journey to tow as long as we stayed under 7,300lb total for the trailer, Journey with the driver. So if for some reason, we're over 60ft and in some states that's illegal, we had to disconnect the trailer and tow it separately from the motorhome we could.

I suspect if you look at the older Journeys which had a 3,500lb tow capacity you'll fine either the curb weight was much less or the CGVW was near 8,300lb.