Brake requirements towing with dolly

AJMike · 12-16-2019, 07:52 AM

We decided to replace our Jeep Renegade (which had no transfer case and so could not be towed except on a flat bed trailer) with something that we could tow. We own a Winnebago Fuse and our allowable tow weight is relatively low (about 3300 pounds) so we ended up with a Honda Fit. It can not be flat towed but it can be towed with a 2 wheel dolly.

My wife is reluctant to give up our garage space to a dolly so I thought I would check out renting a dolly for the few times we would tow. I went to the local U-Haul dealer and found out that none of their tow dollies do have brakes. Those dollies weigh around 700 pounds, our Honda Fit about 2600 pounds and the combined weight is OK for our Fuse, but is also over 3000 pounds and Arizona (where we live) requires brakes on any towed unit over that weight.

Am I missing something here? Why would U-Haul, which must rent a ton of these dollies, not have them equipped with surge brakes? Does the towing weight requirement (which is as low as 1500 pounds in some states) apply only to the car being towed? Or the combined towing weight? Are all of the people using them violating the law? And, if so, why have the states not stopped them from renting the dollies?

I am just completely puzzled by this and don't understand what I am missing. Perhaps buying a dolly would be the best solution but it would take up most of our garage.

**ThomB** · 12-16-2019, 08:23 AM

It's not a requirement to have brakes on the dolly, but to be honest I'm not sure why you wouldn't. Like you said most states have a relatively low towing weight limit which makes it a no-brainer yet there are companies making them. You're probably right that you should just look for one yourself. If it ends up being something that you don't need/want there is always a relsale market of them (which I would suggest that you look at.)

emiddleb · 12-16-2019, 12:03 PM

While there is no requirement for brakes on a dolly per se, there is a requirement for brakes on the dolly IF you exceed the GVWR limit that is exists in most states and Canada. You can tow an empty dolly all you want, but when you apply a load...

Also... unlike drivers licenses, plates etc, there is no reciprocity on tow laws between states. You could be legal in your state but be illegal in the next because they have different rules, and the fact that you are legal "at home" doesn't cover you. That's why most of us go with at least the minimum of brakes and lights on the tow... keeps you covered in most areas.

U-haul without brakes is a subject worth Googling. There have been a few lawsuits about it. According to one case in Arizona they are the only ones in the rental industry who don't have brakes on their rental dollies (I can't confirm this.) Why don't they have them? Well, $$ I'd guess, but JMHO.

AJMike · 12-16-2019, 01:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by emiddleb

While there is no requirement for brakes on a dolly per se, there is a requirement for brakes on the dolly IF you exceed the GVWR limit that is exists in most states and Canada. You can tow an empty dolly all you want, but when you apply a load...

Also... unlike drivers licenses, plates etc, there is no reciprocity on tow laws between states. You could be legal in your state but be illegal in the next because they have different rules, and the fact that you are legal "at home" doesn't cover you. That's why most of us go with at least the minimum of brakes and lights on the tow... keeps you covered in most areas.

The rules seem to differ by quite a bit from state to state but I have always tried to err on the side of caution, and so I always used a braking system in any car I flat-towed, regardless of whether or not the local law required it. Better safe than sorry.

Similarly I would not buy or rent a tow dolly without brakes. I was just surprised that U-Haul has no brakes on its tow dollies. I sent them an email asking why and they responded that it was their understanding that it was the weight of the dolly, not the combined weight, that decided whether brakes were required. That is pretty hard to believe, but the local U-Haul location told me that none of their tow dollies have brakes. None.

Quote:

Originally Posted by emiddleb

U-haul without brakes is a subject worth Googling. There have been a few lawsuits about it. According to one case in Arizona they are the only ones in the rental industry who don't have brakes on their rental dollies (I can't confirm this.) Why don't they have them? Well, $$ I'd guess, but JMHO.

I will Google it and see what I find. In the meantime I am looking for a tow dolly with surge brakes that is not so large as to take up half of our garage. Demco makes a foldable dolly but it is almost as expensive as all of the gear for flat-towing.

Sometimes I think towing is just not worth the trouble ...

AZAspect · 12-16-2019, 01:35 PM

If indeed you only need a toad a few times a year, you might look into either renting a car at your destination(s) or using a cab service. We have done both. Enterprise even comes to you, if needed. When we were in SunRiver, OR, we stopped in Bend and picked up a rental car for the week. One day we will get a toad, but for now this works for us.

Al

**ThomB** · 12-16-2019, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AZAspect

If indeed you only need a toad a few times a year, you might look into either renting a car at your destination(s) or using a cab service. We have done both. Enterprise even comes to you, if needed. When we were in SunRiver, OR, we stopped in Bend and picked up a rental car for the week. One day we will get a toad, but for now this works for us.

Al

To build on the above comment. We have used a service called Turo which is a car share program where you rent a car from an individual rather than a corporation.

It worked well when we were out near Bryce Canyon and the "local" rental car places were an hour away- each way. We were able to find a local rental for about the same cost and they delivered the car to us.

AJMike · 12-16-2019, 02:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AZAspect

If indeed you only need a toad a few times a year, you might look into either renting a car at your destination(s) or using a cab service.

Up to this point that is what we have done, but our normal trips do not revolve around going to cities but rather State or National Parks or Monuments, so many places we go there are no places to rent a car at all. 90% of our trips are to places like Death Valley, Ca, Monument Valley, Utah, Devil's Tower in Wyoming, the Badlands or North or South Dakota, or other places like those that do not have rental cars available.

Generally we just use the RV to get around but there are some local trips that I would not want to take the RV on, and then we would like to have a car. Examples are the road through Monument Valley, the local roads outside of Kadachrome Basin State Park in Utah, or Capitol Reef National Park, also in Utah. Those are all gravel roads and I just don't want to subject the RV to that kind of rough road.

A second concern is that we might want to spend an extended time in some location. We live in Southern Arizona and the summers here are sometimes pretty brutal and it would be nice to be able to go someplace cool like Wyoming to get away from the heat, and I would not want to have to rent a car for an extended period of time.

be happy · 12-17-2019, 03:22 AM

Why can you not store the dolly with the Fuse. I use a dolly and have for many years, and storing both at home and at the campsite can be a small problem. I have however never had a problem at a campsite with storage.

If you were to get a dolly where the ramps can be removed (which to me is a whole other storage problem) roll it to the back of the garage. Then back your fuse in and back over the dolly tongue. If you store your RV at a storage site why can your dolly not be stored there.

As for brakes! do not leave home without them. I have electric brakes on my dolly and am happy for them. I had to slam on the brakes one time and if the dolly did not have brakes there would have been a major problem. Be it surge or electric please get them.

AJMike · 12-17-2019, 10:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by be happy

Why can you not store the dolly with the Fuse. I use a dolly and have for many years, and storing both at home and at the campsite can be a small problem. I have however never had a problem at a campsite with storage.

If you were to get a dolly where the ramps can be removed (which to me is a whole other storage problem) roll it to the back of the garage. Then back your fuse in and back over the dolly tongue. If you store your RV at a storage site why can your dolly not be stored there.

As for brakes! do not leave home without them. I have electric brakes on my dolly and am happy for them. I had to slam on the brakes one time and if the dolly did not have brakes there would have been a major problem. Be it surge or electric please get them.

We have no place at home to store our RV. Our garage is not an RV garage so our Fuse is far too tall and too long to fit in the garage. We currently store it in covered storage and if I could find a way to safely store the dolly with the RV in storage I would do that, but I am not sure how I could store it without the danger of someone just taking it when we were not there.

One thing I thought about doing was wrapping a chain around the tongue portion of the dolly and wrap that chain around the frame of the RV when it is stored or around a pillar in the storage area when we are on a trip. I need to talk to the storage people about what is allowed and what is not.

As for the brake, I had thought about renting from U-Haul until I found out that their tow dollies do not have brakes. After I found that out I put them out of my mind. I would not go on a trip towing our car without having brakes on the dolly. I assume surge brakes as I would not want to have to install a brake controller just to use the dolly occasionally.

Morich · 12-22-2019, 10:06 AM

One first priority for us is to make trips interesting and fun and that means it has to be as easy as practical.
That does not include a dolly in our view. Watching folks manage hooking up the dolly running the car on and strapping it down, just put us off to the point that we bit the bullet and had the work done on the car we had to make it safe to tow four down. It cost around four hundred to get it all set but my Focus did have "special" problems. But those problems were easy for the pro tow hitch installers to manage and we can hook and be gone in half the time plus do not have to store a dolly, either at home or at the campsite. If you do like the state, local, and national parks, having a dolly or renting is just too much stress for our flavor.
The question of why rentals don't have brakes is probably one of those which is ignored until there is a big case and lawyers find you were not running with the law and then it becomes a BIG problem for you. I bet the rental agreement requires you to follow all state and local laws, doesn't it? So does it get down to you not following the agreement you signed so they are off the hook? I wouldn't want to lay much money on that bet!

Texcan754 · 12-22-2019, 07:27 PM

We have a tow dolly with disc brakes that stands up when stored and takes up two feet by ten feet when standing. Also stores under our MH at sites.

NXR · 12-22-2019, 09:02 PM

I use a coupler lock and just back the motor home over the dolly. Only about two feet of the dolly is not under the motor home. Adding the dolly to my RV policy to cover theft and comprehensive cost $37 a year.

AJMike · 12-23-2019, 06:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Texcan754

We have a tow dolly with disc brakes that stands up when stored and takes up two feet by ten feet when standing. Also stores under our MH at sites.

Why model is that? Our main concern has been storage since the dollies we have seen are so large that they will take up half (or more) of our garage. A stand up dolly should take up far less space.

AJMike · 12-23-2019, 06:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NXR

I use a coupler lock and just back the motor home over the dolly. Only about two feet of the dolly is not under the motor home. Adding the dolly to my RV policy to cover theft and comprehensive cost $37 a year.

It never occurred to me that I could add a tow dolly to our RV policy. That is a great idea. I had worried about how to secure the dolly if we store it under our RV. I thought I would have to use chains to keep it secure but perhaps using a good solid lock on the coupler would do as well.

I just worry that someone could easily cut the hasp of the lock and easily drive away with it. That would leave us in the position of having both the RV and the car and no dolly.

CoolBreeze · 12-23-2019, 07:00 AM

Long time lurker and Acme Tow Dolly user (surge brakes & it stands up in the garage) with a nit to pick.. Why does every single thread asking for dolly help always have to have someone add their 2 cents about 4-down towing. We don't care!
/rant off

"That does not include a dolly in our view. Watching folks manage hooking up the dolly running the car on and strapping it down, just put us off to the point that we bit the bullet and had the work done on the car we had to make it safe to tow four down"

AJMike · 12-23-2019, 07:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoolBreeze

Long time lurker and Acme Tow Dolly user (surge brakes & it stands up in the garage) with a nit to pick.. Why does every single thread asking for dolly help always have to have someone add their 2 cents about 4-down towing. We don't care!
/rant off

"That does not include a dolly in our view. Watching folks manage hooking up the dolly running the car on and strapping it down, just put us off to the point that we bit the bullet and had the work done on the car we had to make it safe to tow four down"

We decided to use a tow dolly instead of flat-towing for several reasons. We just bought a new car and the one we bought (a Honda Fit automatic) can not be flat-towed. We looked at several cars, some of which could be flat-towed but decided on the Honda Fit as the best fit (ha, ha) for our needs.

Second, even if it had been capable of being flat-towed I am not sure I would have chosen to do that. First, the flat-towing restrictions on most new cars require that the car be run every 4 or 5 hours for 5 or 10 minutes, presumably to make sure everything is lubricated, and that seems like a real pain. In addition typically there is a relatively slow speed limit imposed. Most of the ones we saw were 65 mph. That is not too bad since we usually drive at 62 or so but it makes passing on back roads very dangerous if you can not exceed 65 mph. And lastly is the cost of flat towing. The local shops want $4500 to $5500 for a new installation and that just seems excessive for someone who only plans to tow a car once or twice a year.

Given that, and the fact that our tow capacity is relatively low at about 3400 pounds, made the decision to use a tow dolly easy. The more difficult choice is which one to get.

NXR · 12-23-2019, 07:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoolBreeze

Long time lurker and Acme Tow Dolly user (surge brakes & it stands up in the garage) with a nit to pick.. Why does every single thread asking for dolly help always have to have someone add their 2 cents about 4-down towing. We don't care!
/rant off

"That does not include a dolly in our view. Watching folks manage hooking up the dolly running the car on and strapping it down, just put us off to the point that we bit the bullet and had the work done on the car we had to make it safe to tow four down"

As an Acme Tow Dolly user myself I would ditch the dolly in a heartbeat if I could. The Acme meets our technical needs because it is about 300 pounds lighter than competing models and it requires that the steering wheel be unlocked, and my Hyundai steering wheel does not lock. Their long, removable ramps work well for my low profile car; I do not need to put "helper boards" under the ramp ends to keep the car from scraping on the dolly.

We're at a back-in site now which has ample space to store the dolly behind the motorhome but where the pad is not long enough to hook the car up on the pad. The roads here are about 15' wide so I have to pull out of the campground to load the car; I cannot do load the car the night before.

If it's raining or the ground is muddy it's a literal mess to hook up and so am I. Add the fact that the Acme winches are required to be bolted in place and will not slide side to side, as other dollies do. That means I must have the car on the dolly +/- one inch (at worst) every time or the straps are offset and slip. Occasionally I hit it right in the first few times. More likely I'm off a few inches and have to retry again and again.

"Move the car 2" to the right" from the spotter is something that simply is not possible to judge, for me anyways. If the car is not perfectly straight on the dolly then it's another retry because one tire is set a few inches back from the other.

I have to budget a full hour to load the car. Sometimes it's only a half-hour. Getting the car off the dolly, the lights disconnected and stowed, the ramps and tools and straps and chains put away, and the dolly moved, burns another twenty minutes.

Oddly, I originally thought the safety chains underneath would be the worst part. They're actually the easiest part to install. Getting them off if the dolly is slightly off-center from the motorhome is another story. If I do not have the room to re-position the motorhome then I have to really crank down on the winches to pull the tire forward to release the tension on the chains. Sometimes it's almost impossible to get the ramps into the slots or they have to drop in a different slot than is optimal.

So yes, I agree with that poster. For me it is a less than optimum solution. But it is a solution.

Ray

NXR · 12-23-2019, 07:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AJMike

I just worry that someone could easily cut the hasp of the lock and easily drive away with it. That would leave us in the position of having both the RV and the car and no dolly.

I figure it's no different than someone stealing your tow bar or a tow bar breaking. I doubt there is a big market for stolen dollies, however our driving instructor told us to etch the VIN into the frame in case it was stolen or mixed up at a storage facility. Otherwise it's just a sticker.

Ray

Texcan754 · 12-23-2019, 08:27 AM

www.cartowdolly.com

This is Acme, several hundred pounds lighter, easy to handle and stores standing upright.

jcurtisis · 12-23-2019, 10:18 AM

We have a tow smart tow dolly (https://towsmarttrailers.com/ ) to haul our Honda Fit (also automatic transmission). It has surge brakes, and tows like a Dream behind our 2018 Navion 24D, and is designed to be stored upright. I too thought about Uhaul/renting a car/ getting electric bikes but decided the tow dolly was best for us. We use it “as the situation demands”. Don’t need it in Zion, Bryce, Joshua Tree for example. We are planning to take it for our trip to Glacier and Yellowstone as those places are so spread out and crowded in the Summer. Hooking up does take a bit of time- it is just part of the game. FYI I also got a harbor freight trailer dolly to move it around when at our home because we have a bit of a hill on our driveway. If you are just moving it on flat areas you may not need one.