Also, since we've gone down this road before, tow capacity isn't the end all either. The weight of your truck passengers, truck gear, truck gas, etc, can erode the actual tow capacity. It seems some vehicles owner's manuals calculate it differently.
At the end of the day, my biggest concern that gets overlooked in the excitement of wanting to get to the ramp is the on- the-road margin for safety. When things go fine, all is well, but it's the outlier situations while towing to me is where the problems can occur. I've owned 4 tow vehicles with my current sig boat and when I first got the boat I only had a low power, old, front wheel drive minivan not rated anywhere near the 4000 lb wet weight taking into account the full passenger load, plus a lot of cargo and gas in the van. I didn't care and got to towing as fast as I could hitch it up. It only took a couple incidents to see the problems that can occur towing with that particular unibody vehicle. It had air springs that really masked it's weeknesses plus the full tow package. Like I said before it pulled it out of the steepest ramp imaginable fine with the same effort as pulling into a parking spot but what it couldn't do is high speed maneuver well when the idiot pulling the trailer full of hay pulls out in front of you while you are doing 60 and the minivan has the huge benefit that it is as long as a suburban. Since learning how not to tow with the minivan, I've owned three full on v8 suv's/4wd with the works and it was like being blind and suddenly being able to see the capability difference is so immence. It was really the iBoats people that opened my eyes.
