Hi. I'm a new member of this list. I went browsing through the
archives and hung out for a little while before jumping in with this
possible FAQ.
My wife and I don't own a Dakota, yet. We have a '92 Ford Ranger which
we are thinking of upgrading to either a Dakota V8, or a Ram 1500. We
need something to tow horses. However, we don't need to tow that often;
the truck would be used for standard transportation 98% of the time.
But when we do tow, we want it to be safe. We don't need to break any
land speed records -- we just want to be able to make it up hills, and
have a truck with enough weight to control the trailer, not the other
way around.
So our dilemma is this: Can the Dakota V8 safely tow 2 large horses plus
the trailer, plus some hay thrown in the bed, etc.? Or do we really
need a full-size truck?
Looking at the numbers in the brochure, we see that Dodge warrantees the
Dakota V8 to tow somewhere around 6,500 lbs. We estimate our
trailer+horses would weigh around 4,500 lbs., but we could be off by a
fair margin. Even so, the numbers say we're okay. But we'd like to
hear some real-world experience before we jump into this.
We'd like to get the Dakota because it gets better gas mileage and would
be easier to manuever around town because of its smaller size. Driving
a monstrous full-size truck all over the place just because we need it
2% of the time seems ridiculous.
One rule of thumb we've heard is that you don't want the trailer to
outweigh the truck, which makes sense. However, I'm having a hard time
finding the actual weight of a Dakota. Can someone look at their
vehicle registration slip and tell me their number? We'd be looking at
the beefiest Dakota you can get: V8, club cab, heaviest cargo rating.
Probably 2WD, though.
Any stories or advice? I saw that some people have had good luck towing
things like 3,500 lb. boats. Anyone towing 5,000+ lb. loads over 1,000+
mile distances? Anyone using a gooseneck horse trailer on a Dakota?
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Paul Caskey mailto:pcaskey@swcp.com http://www.swcp.com/pcaskey
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"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full."
--Henry Kissinger
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