Mobility Scooter carrier and Class 3 Hitch

The video for the hitch installation is completely useless.

 

"*This video is intended to give a general overview of how this hitch is installed. For more specific information or details, please refer to the written instructions."

Mine (an earlier version) was installed by Torklift at its shop in Kent. A couple years later, I installed one on my Subaru using their written instructions, which were sufficient.

 

It's highly unlikely there was any significant testing with trailer hitch... My point was cars are designed to absorb huge amounts force in an accident and a maxxed out hitch at 300 pounds even under 3G of downward force is not going to bend the whole back of the car and cause the rear doors to pop out. I mean maybe in Hollywood if Godzilla put his foot on hitch and it was thousands of pounds of force. Or more practically, if you were hauling a really long empty boat trailer and it jacknifed in a way that maximized the force of the lever to thousands of pounds, but a heavy duty mobility scooter on a heavy duty hitch bouncing hard at free way speeds, it's not going to total the car on it's own...

 

Come on folks, we aren't talking about towing, we're talking about mounting stuff to the rear of the car... Any disabled person will have this exact need and I've even seen Teslas with the exact same configuration... Sometimes the fearmongering on this website is so beyond ridiculous I can't stand it!

All ya'll are buying into ableist discrimination here. Telling disabled people they can't mount their mobility scooter to the back of the car is flat out wrong, oppressive and just plain stupid!

Disabled people need to mount their rig on the back of their car and ADA lawsuits would be fast and furious against the automakers if they didn't design a car to handle this basic lightweight load.

 

That 360 pounds of mobility scooter and tray are multiple feet out on a lever arm. The mounting bolts at the fulcrum are seeing much greater forces.

The car frame is designed to be not rigid, but instead to deform under crash loads as part of its energy-absorbing function.

Absent better details of the design of the frame in the local area where the hitch maker chooses to mount it against car maker warnings, I simply cannot have the same confidence that you are displaying.

 

Confidence in something that has potential to be a concern is not a passive sit back and worry kind of thing. It requires using your brain and the laws of physics / due diligence. As I've already said, modifying what mounts to the hitch to shorten the lever / leverage as much is possible is wise. Also wise is taking initial measurements and then following up with more measurements to make sure everything is still solid.

Also wise is to ask others, like myself, who have real life experience with minimizing/modifying so forces on a hitch and mount can carry a heavy load on the back of the car in the safest way possible.

What isn't wise, and frankly downright counter-productive is to "help" a disabled Prius owner by scaring the person into thinking their going to bend their car in half and back doors are gonna fly open and never close again by hauling a simple mobility scooter on the back. The people on here making these ridiculous claims clearly have no direct experience with this type of hitch configuration in the first place and not only is it outright stupid for them to fearmonger others in such a ways, but it's also unfairly discriminatory against disabled people!

 

The difference between being able to do something, and whether you should do something.

Why do we buy a Prius?
Because of the differences between it, and regular ICE vehicles. We want the benefits created by Hybrid Synergy Drive, the electric motors, the planetary gear transmission, the regenerative brakes.

Because of the differences between a Prius and a regular vehicle, Toyota says the Prius is NOT designed to tow things.

But then, if we want to tow something, we ignore the warning, and the differences We throw a trailer or attach a hitch, drive it, and then proclaim..."We can do it". Even though the designers of the vehicle itself, warn against this action, we think we know more about the design and it's "real" capabilities.

I think this is unwise.

If you own a Prius? You own something different. A Prius is the RIGHT tool for the job, in a LOT of scenarios. Traffic jams, urban congestion, long highways drives...it's designed to provide a lot of benefit.

Towing? Attaching a hitch?
Well, it's not the right tool for the job.
Instead of speculating that despite the printed warning in your owners manual it's actually OK? If we are talking speculation? Maybe it's not good with the planetary gear suspension, the electric motors, the regenerative brakes, and the whole computer system that is designed to operate HSD and the vehicle as a non-towing vehicle?
Will it bend your frame? Who knows? But who cares?
I only need one reason to say the Prius is not the right tool to use to tow, and that is because Toyota say's it is not.

I've been around this debate long enough, to know IF you do it? Or think it's possible? Nothing I or anyone say's about not doing it, is going to change your mind.

I also understand that like the OP of this thread sometimes situations exist where one would want to expand the capabilities of the Prius. But sometimes the hard truth, is you don't have the right tool for the job.
Which is why my advice leans towards investigating different scooter options, Maybe something that IS light enough, portable enough to be actually put in the back of a Prius.

Basically, I think if you tow with a Prius you're doing it with risk. Toyota doesn't provide enough information to quantify this risk, or even specifically define what it is putting at risk. They just say...don't do it.

My PURE SPECULATION is that it might have to do with protecting the electric motors and/or how the weight and weight dispersal might affect the operation of the regenerative brakes. The Prius is complex piece of engineering, transferring energy from a battery and electric motors to an ICE engine, and blending energy from both those systems.
In short? There are plenty of reasons to speculate why towing ISN'T a good a idea, as opposed to defaulting to the concept that I can do it, therefore it's perfectly OK to do it.

 

Towing, hauling something on the back on ANY vehicle that is NOT designed to do that, is a safety hazard.
I repeat: "Yet, people are going to do it.
They paid for it they can do what they want with it.
But if they get in a wreck, they will get sued, and lose. And hopefully, no innocent people are killed."

 

First thing I did before I bought my Prius hitch was to call and ask my auto insurance carrier. They have actual insurance actuaries that unlike all the wild speculation in this discussion on PriusChat use real accident data and real math to calculate accurate measures of risk, because their profitability depends on it...

My Insurance company made it perfectly clear that if I put a hitch on my Prius and use a trailer, my vehicle, as well as the trailer, continues to enjoy full insurance coverage with no change whatsoever because according to their calculations the increased risk is way too minor for it to change a full coverage insurance policy.

So there you go... Real life... Unlike all the nervous nellie armchair opinion-makers on here who don't have direct experience with what we're discussing. Both myself and others who have installed a hitch on a Prius and who have real life experience of loading it up as a trailer or as a rear mounted hitch rack for bikes or mobility scooters have information that can be useful to the original poster.

The rest of you are probably needing to worry about much more important things in your life like your diet and lack of physical exercise, but instead you distract yourself by warning people online about your speculative fears, because the real and present dangerous things you do in life are too hard to face up to and you rather put all that unprocessed baggage off on others rather than look at yourself in the mirror at the risks you take everyday by not exercising enough and eating too much unhealthy food.

 

Thanks for being honest...

Do you have any direct experience working with hitches on Prius? Any direct experience with building mounts for the hitch that pushes up near max tongue weight?

 

Thanks for ripping that phrase out of the context he was using it, and diverting it to your own hobby-horse.

 

He was being speculative on why Toyota doesn't recommend hitches... How about you Fuzzy1? Do you have any first hand direct experience with hitches, mounts and trailers for Prius?

 

Here's a picture of a Gen1 Insight with a trailer hitch... This car weighs only 1,800 pounds because the frame is aluminum and many of the body parts are plastic. Notice the slight bend in the hitch for too much tongue weight? I'd like to think it's reciever part of the hitch that bent and not where the four bolts go into the frame... But I just saw this car briefly so I don't know. I share this picture because a Prius weighs near an additional thousand pounds, which means it's frame is much stronger. In all my experience this is the type of damage that is caused when you exceed the tongue weight. Notice the car has not bent in half...

 

Answered within this very thread before you even asked. Was that TL-DR for you?

I even provided the direct URL that answered his immediate question.

Spare me the needless abuse of your wild misapplication of the discrimination card. Had I intended to discriminate, I would neither have posted a direct URL solving his immediate need, nor pointed towards a more robust solution.

Save your discrimination card for the manufacturers who put this in the owner's manual:



Note also that all tongue weight counts towards the vehicle load:


Note also that a heavy load positioned behind the rear axle also exerts a torque that reduces the weight on the front wheels. If that rearward nose-lifting torque is large enough, it may have an adverse impact on steering and control when driving in adverse traction conditions. BTDT on a prior vehicle.

 

I 3peat: "Yet, people are going to do it.
They paid for it they can do what they want with it.
But if they get in a wreck, they will get sued, and lose. And hopefully, no innocent people are killed."

 

Nope.
But I'm assuming the builders/manufacturers and designers of the Prius, who put the phrase "Do Not Tow" in the owners manual- do.

 

I have a little bit of experience going back heading towards 40 years as a teenager modifying putting load suspension kits and modifying alignments not following to manufacturer specifications all the time to improve handling and breaking. On contractors trucks and doing transmission shift kits to improve the life and performance of transmissions back in the early 80s. Just taking that knowledged and pass it on to passenger cars. Since most Americans don’t travel outside their own country and pretty shortsighted and travel life with blinders on. If you see what they do with small cars in the Philippines and over in India travel the country side away from the cities in China you will see amazing feats of wonder out of the tiniest cars that perform their whole life as if they were a small pick up truck a workhorse for a family or small personal business and they work just fine. Here’s a link to my YouTube posting while I was modifying a heavy duty rack on top of my Prius at the end of the video I discuss the nitrogen airbags to increase the load capability of my rear suspension and a U-Haul trailer hitch I have attached to my Prius. I performed this exact same modification to my 2009 Toyota Yaris with over 300,000 miles on it with the same engine and same transmission and it still running my son uses it in our contracting business as a equipment and materials hauling vehicle that travels from point a to point B and gets dropped off as a giant toolbox on a job site that has an engine installed in it .

Just remember people never thought Prius would make a great Taxi being loaded with people all day picking up luggage at the airport and going up and down the hills of San Francisco and they get 300 almost 400,000 miles out of those little vehicles a Prius can do a lot more than you think you can .

 

I forgot to mention if you plan on towing putting heavy loads having a lot of weight on the top of a roof rack upgrading your tires is highly and strongly suggested the stock tires suck and are actually dangerous there are the minimum quality minimum safety tires that manufactures can get away with. This link takes you to a highly recommended tire. https://m.tirerack.com/tires/tires.jsp?tireMake=Yokohama&tireModel=ADVAN+Fleva+V701&partnum=055VR5V701&vehicleSearch=true&fromCompare1=yes&autoMake=Toyota&autoYear=2009&autoModel=Yaris+Liftback&autoModClar=3-Door&autoMake=Toyota&autoYear=2009&autoModel=Yaris+Liftback&autoModClar=3-Door
Of course soft tread tires have excellent breaking characteristics in summer weather specially and the stiff side walls have excellent handling characteristics without the lag time between when you move the steering wheel there’s a time delay because of the tall soft side walls a passenger car tires before the tread actually turns and starts during your vehicle in another direction. But with performance tires you got a remember you’ll be lucky if you get 15,000 miles of tread life out of them you sacrifice a few dollars for safety.

 

With my speculation, I'm only saying, there are plenty more speculative reasons as to "why" it's a bad idea to use a Prius to tow, than limiting it to...it's OK because it's not bending the frame.
And I'm NOT speculating as to TOYOTA the manufacturers stance on the issue.

 

who cares what Toyota says, they build a rock solid 350,000 to 400,000 mile vehicle with out needing a engine or transmission that's why they walk all over GM, Chrysler, Ford combined !!! if you know how to service it and not fallow the recommended service schedule and some fluids. Toyota is being safe , legally and warranty claims.