Sustainable Trailer Towing
Sustainable trailer towing
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
“HERE’S A QUESTION YOU MIGHT CONsider in your column,” a motorcycle dealer said to me a few weeks ago. “Why am I selling so many bike trailers? I used to sell only one or two a year, but now the number is way up. Why do people suddenly need to haul bikes on trailers?”
I have to admit I was momentarily stumped. This doesn’t happen very often, unless I’m pondering a Unified Theory of the Physical Universe, or wondering if I should spring for synthetic oil at $8.99 a quart in my KTM, or just get a premium brand of mineral oil for $ 1.99. And if synthetic oil isn’t made from “minerals,” what’s it made from? Tree sap? Distracting questions, all of them.
But back to trailers.
“I don’t know why there are more trailers around,” I said. “Maybe the answer is specialization. I have a bike trailer, and so do a lot of my friends. We use them for track days or dirtbikes, or just for hauling motorcycles to Daytona in the winter. Also, a lot of people haul their sportbikes out to the Rockies or the Blue Ridge, where the curves are. Saves the tires until you need them.”
“Also,” I added as an afterthought, “a lot of touring bikes now are pretty big to wrestle into the back of a van or pickup truck when you need to transport them. Trailers are easier to load.”
All coherent reasons, I suppose, but it occurred to me later (just last night, actually) that the probable reason for more trailer sales is simply increased wealth.
I’ve been reading a book, you see, called The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook. He points out that, for all our grousing about the economic stresses of modem life and our nostalgia for the good old Fifties, nearly all Americans with jobs are materially much better off than they were even a decade or two ago.
We have bigger houses, more cars per family, cell phones, bass boats, SUVs, RVs, PCs, ATVs, CDs, DVDs, etc.-tons of things our parents didn't dream of owning. We talk poor, but have an enormous and unprecedented amount of stuff.
I was glad to read this, because now I feel a lot richer. Never mind that I’ll probably spend my retirement years living on peanut butter and crackers because I’ve blown all my money on motorcycles, old British car restorations and vintage electric guitars.
And trailers. Actually, I haven’t spent quite enough money on trailers recently, and that’s the
crux of a current problem.
I usually haul bikes in the back of my Ford van, but there are occasions when an excess number of passengers and/or motorcycles forces the use of a trailer. The one bike trailer I own is a weatherbeaten, light-duty, three-rail rig I bought 14 years ago. It was clearly built to hold no more than two spindly dirtbikes or one streetbike, but the poor thing’s been flogged to Daytona and back three times, hauling pairs of 500-pound streetbikes. It also gets loaned out constantly, so it’s been through more wheel bearings than I’ve had hot meals. Those little 12-inch wheels spin like twin turbos, and you always drive down the highway with one ear cocked for the siren sound of bearing failure, half expecting a wheel to pass you in the fast lane. In short, something heavier-duty would be nice.
This past fall, Rob Himmelmann and I made a “ranch run” to the South Dakota cattle ranch/dirtbike paradise of our friend Randy Babcock. We took his ATK 605 and my KTM 525 to ride on the ranch, but also brought along our dual-sport Suzuki DR650s for exploring the backroads of the Badlands.
We put two bikes in my van and then loaded the other two on Rob’s trailer, which has 14-inch tires and much larger axles and hubs than mine. It’s a heavyduty steel trailer, with a drop-gate ramp, flat bed and a rail running all the way around it-you could use it to haul snowmobiles or riding mowers, if you’d accidentally spent your money on the wrong sort of vehicle.
This thing worked fine, but reduced the van’s mileage from 18 on the highway down to about 11 mpg. Pretty dismal, with current fuel prices. Our all-too-frequent fill-ups were costing $60-plus.
As Rob and I are both “economy minded” (which sounds a lot better than “cheapskates”), this outrageous expense set off a long discussion on what the ideal, most efficient, long-term combination of tow vehicle and trailer might be. This question is especially germane to both of us, because Rob is recently retired and living on a fixed income, and it’s my fondest hope to retire someday myself and do a lot of riding, preferably several months before I drop dead.
Rob’s vote was for a diesel truck or van, pulling an all-aluminum trailer.
“That new Chrysler box van with the Mercedes turbo-diesel is supposed to get about 30 mpg on the highway,” he said. “Combine that with a light aluminum trailer, and you’d have a pretty efficient combination.”
We no sooner got home from the trip than Rob ran out and bought an aluminum trailer from a friend who owns a Suzuki shop.
“It’s exactly like my old trailer, but it weighs 250 pounds instead of 500,” he told me over the phone. “I used it to haul my brother’s R1100GS back from Virginia this week and got 42 mpg with the trailer empty and 30 mpg loaded.”
“What on Earth were you towing it with?” I asked incredulously.
“My old turbo-diesel Beetle.”
My eyes narrowed and I exhaled through my teeth, like a cave man watching a space launch. Could this be the future of towing in a world aflame over oil reserves? A de-escalation of mass, in which lighter loads automatically allowed the use of lighter tow vehicles?
“Do you have the phone number of that Suzuki shop with the aluminum trailers?” I asked Rob.
I decided to do one thing at a time. Trailer first; a diesel car or truck could always come later.
My dad, of course, somehow got through life without either one. But then he didn’t have two slightly different dirtbikes to worry about. Or any vintage electric guitars, either.
