Q. I need a tow car for a small keel boat (19ft, trailer and boat about 1200kg). Is an EV okay/better or worse than an ICE car for towing?
A. In the early days of EVs, this would have been a simple answer and it would have been: electric cars don’t tow. For quite some time, and until relatively recently, the Tesla Model X (long since discontinued in right-hand drive) was the only EV on sale with an official towing rating (2,750kg on a braked trailer in case you were wondering).
That has changed dramatically, and now it’s more a case of the tiny handful of EVs which aren’t rated for towing. There are tales of people bolting tow-hitches to the likes of early Nissan Leafs and Hyundai Konas – which weren’t officially tow-rated – and hauling small trailers or caravans, but that’s really not a good idea. An early electric car might be well able to physically pull the load, but the problems arise when you start to slow down. The extra weight of a trailer and load can actually overwhelm the regenerative braking system, and can cause damage to both that and the battery.
The good news is that newer electric cars can be exceptionally good at towing. The high torque output of an electric motor – or better yet, an EV with a twin-motor, four-wheel drive set-up – makes easy work of getting a trailer, caravan or other towed load rolling. Most new electric cars also come with cutting-edge electronic safety systems, which often include the likes of specific trailer stability set-ups for the electronic stability control, as well as trailer reversing assistance for the rear-view cameras. Check the spec of your particular car to see what you’ve got on board.
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Turning specifically to our reader’s question above, the 1,200kg weight of the trailer and boat combo does pose a small issue: some popular EVs don’t have the capacity to haul that much. Examples include the Volkswagen ID.4 Pro, the Skoda Enyaq Sportline, and the Tesla Model 3 – all of which are restricted to 1,000kg of braked trailer. Some have even lower weight ratings. A BMW iX3, for example, can only tow 750kg of braked weight, and that’s also the case for the Toyota bz4X, the standard-range models of the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5, the Mercedes-Benz EQA 350 and the BYD Atto 3.
So which current EVs can haul the needed 1,200kg? Lots, as it turns out: the BMW iX1 and iX2, the Mini Countryman, Audi Q4 e-tron 50 and the VW ID.4 GTX can all manage 1,200kg. Fancy a bit of wiggle-room in the weight limit? That’s fine. Get a Polestar 4 Long Range, a BYD Seal, a Hyundai Ioniq 5 or Ioniq 6 with the 77kWh battery, Volvo EX40 and EC40, or a Polestar 2, all of which can manage 1,500kg of braked weight. Need more? The Tesla Model Y can cope with 1,600kg, a BMW i5 M60 Touring can haul 2,000kg, while a Kia EV9 can cope with 2,500kg.
All of which is well and good, but what actually happens when you hitch something up to the back of your EV? Well, the short version is that you lose range. Weight is a killer when it comes to range, so even a relatively compact-but-heavy load can have an impact. Then there’s the aerodynamic question. A large but light load can often have as bad an impact as a small but hefty one.
The amount of range you lose will largely depend on your car, the load and how you drive. However, a good rule of thumb is that every 750kg of weight will trim at least 100km off your range. We recently spoke to Christian Schlüter, from Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles. Schlüter has been touring Europe in a specially converted Volkswagen ID.Buzz as part of a promotional event, and with both a compact, teardrop-shaped caravan on the back, and a folded-down roof-tent, he reckons that the usable range of the Buzz dropped to about 200km, or less than half the officially quoted WLTP range. Your mileage, as ever, may well vary.
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The other issue will be charging en route, or indeed at destination. Fast-charging when towing can be a fraught business as hardly any DC public chargers are designed for trailer access. Mostly you’ll have to pull up, unhitch the trailer and manhandle that into a parking space, and then charge. There are some drive-through chargers – notably the SSE charging plaza in Mullingar – but these are still rare, and are mostly designed for HGVs, so be prepared for some blasting with air horns if you occupy one for too long.