Lifting your vehicle is not just a hobby. It’s a lifestyle. Your lifted vehicle is used for adventuring the off roads and traversing the toughest terrains, but it is also a part of your everyday life. Sometimes one may begin to wonder if certain activities are fit for a lifted truck. One must remember that with customization, one’s vehicle performance can change without realizing it. Getting to the apex, are lifted vehicles fit for towing? Well, there are many points we must delve into before any call can be made! Read along and start contemplating about the following points. One must fully understand the details before accepting any kind of conclusion.
Can You Tow With A Lifted Truck?
First, let’s begin with the basics. We don’t have to go so far, you can use your own experience to answer this point. Installing a lift kit is no slice of pie, and one must adapt to these modifications. After lifting your vehicle for the first time, I’m pretty sure the first thing you noticed was the difference in handling, stability, and performance. Lifting your vehicle literally creates physical changes. One must understand that these changes affect the mechanism of certain parts, which then influence the whole. The administration of the vehicle is totally morphed. Therefore one cannot use the stock booklet references to explain the vehicle’s capacities and functions.
Understanding that, one can simply say that by lifting a vehicle, one is modifying the suspension. What is the essence of towing? The suspension. A truck’s suspension is key for towing. After analyzing those small details, It’s pretty obvious that a vehicle’s towing capabilities are getting affected. Maybe more than directly one first hypothesized.
Understanding Your Lifted Vehicle
Explaining the precise deterrents caused by lifting a vehicle is not a sane way to approach this since every vehicle has been modified differently and every vehicle’s engineering works differently. But one can undeviatingly say that towing is not coveted the same way as for an unmodified vehicle whose towing capacities are already synced and tailored.
To give you an example, a possible outcome of towing with a lifted vehicle could lead to the front wheels of your vehicle lifting when towing heavy loads. The issue with this scenario is that the front wheels could lose traction and adhesion, therefore leading to unresponsive steering.
I want to remind you that I am analyzing all this through the extreme side. Towing with a vehicle is actually pretty safe and no big deal, especially if your lift is below the 4-inch range, but I take the exaggerated cases when it comes to safety. My motto is to never underestimate the importance of safety. If there is a 1 percent chance of a safety issue pertaining to a matter, I shall address and inform it. Awareness is knowledge. With all this information one can measure the issues and analyze the risk factors themselves before deciding to do something.
How To Make Towing With A Lifted Truck Safer
If your lifted vehicle is modified to the point that you begin to doubt its safety, then there are still some alternatives to make a tow safer. That alternative would be to install a drop hitch. This option is ideal, especially for those vehicles with bigger lifts because the higher the vehicle is, the more incompatible towing may become. A positive point to installing these is that they are easy to install and can be that fast remedy you need to run a quick tow, but the downside to them is that while a drop hitch will help with the trailer height, it doesn’t help with sag that comes along with it.
Conclusion
Lifted vehicles can tow but due to lift modifications and the implicated safety issues that may arise with doing so, would make it an unrecommendable election. Moderate lifts don’t impose any serious hazard but can lead to situations where towing can damage suspension components and even the vehicle’s frame. One must remember the purpose of a lifted truck. It varies but is correlated to having extra clearance space to endure the off-road, uneven terrain, and fit larger tires. One may run a towing errand if necessary, but it’s recommended to use your lifted vehicle for the purpose you originally planned for it. All in all, one cannot know the answer to this question better than you! It’s essential to understand how much your vehicle has changed before towing.
This answer shall not fall into the false dilemma fallacy. There is no simple yes or no answer. There are not only two mutually exclusive outcomes. One can compromise or re-frame this issue into something that best suits your needs, but only after fully understanding the issues and being aware of the warnings and risks. I can safely say that lifted trucks aren’t ideal for towing, but that does not mean that they can’t. They still can tow trailers and campers, but the handling, braking, and other components may be compromised. Even so, if you want to tow with a lifted vehicle, then check up on all the safety precautions and analyze them before realizing one.
