I' thinking of buying a class c rv & towing my Prius behind with the ft wheels off the ground. Anyone out there doing this?
It's not recomended, it's really low in rear when towed. You could scrap off the bumper and such. Put on a four wheel trailer!
Yeah, I'm trying to get my Prius towed tonight, and the tow company that Geico hired refused to tow my car like this b/c they said that it would badly damage the car. They said that we have to wait for a truck with a wheel lift / dolly tow.
Look for a different tow company. IF.....they don't lift it too high and don't go too fast, there is NO reason that a standard tow rig won't work just fine. Same for the dolly behind an RV. IF......you get a dolly that doesn't raise the front end too much you should be fine. The picture posted looks fine to me.
I don't see a problem unless you forget about the car when you're backing up. If any car isn't meant to be towed on 4 wheels with a tow-bar, it's the Prius. There's actually no "neutral" in the Prius, only a sort of neutral-emulation mode. The engine remains connected to the drive-train at all times; it's never disconnected with any sort of clutch or torque-converter. To accomplish what seems like coasting, the electric drive-motor has to read the wheel-rotation speed and applying zero-torque, it runs backwards through the power-differential to accommodate the engine speed, whether it's running or stopped. Quite a tall-order when you think about it, but the computer accomplishes all of this flawlessly and transparently to achieve the illusion of coasting, when it's doing nothing of the sort.
I know this might be a dusty thread, but i wanted to share a bit of our recent experience towing our 2010 Prius behind our Class C motor home for 1700 miles this summer. I searched for any number of how to's specifically for the Prius, but to no avail; so here's our experience. We purchased a Tow Master from a local dealer, and it worked fine, with some tweaks. We attempted to order an American Car Dolly, but we were not confident he would be able to deliver our dolly in time. If we had to do it over again, I'd have ordered the dolly four to six months out, as I'd have preferred it over the Tow Master. On most cars, you can wrap the safety chains around the front axle, but that's not a great option on the low profile Prius. We purchased an additional tow hook, and two Reese brand 5000 lb safety chains from Lowes. There are two covers on the front bumper that can be carefully pried off and removed, so the tow hooks can be screwed in. I cut four lengths of 1 x 8 (2 @ 30 inches, 2 @ 18 inches) to use as ramps to lift the Prius up to get it on the dolly ramps so it didn't scrape. There's more discussion on this elsewhere online. Once we got the Prius on the dolly, I strapped the wheels down, while my wife threaded the safety chains thru the tow hooks on the Prius. We connected the other end to the first link of the safety chain for the tow dolly, reasoning that that chain should be strong enough to hold the entire tow dolly if the hitch fails, so it should be plenty strong enough to hold the car if the tire straps fail. (Indeed, our first go with the loaded dolly involved getting beat up by US 69 in Oklahoma. When we stopped for the evening, we noticed that one of the tire straps had slid off the tire. The car had moved back about three inches on that side, but the other tire strap held the car on the tow dolly. Good to know, not great for the rear tires, and not something we'd ever want to repeat.) We are still working on how much slack is needed on the safety chains to ensure that we can negotiate turns without issues, but being tight enough to minimize how far back the car would roll if the tire straps failed. I've attached a photo of our setup under tow. Next trip we take it out I hope to make a video of our process. Not sure what we are doing is the absolute best solution, but it worked for us, and I hope it provides some guidance to other towing newbies out there.
