Re: Will my car be able to tow this boat??? Please help...
I'm not sure I buy the early death thing. The bigger question is not "can my car tow it?" but rather "can my car stop it?"
Safety aside, here is some strictly anecdotal evidence on the issue of driveline and unibody strength. As usual, your mileage may vary. First driveline.
I have a friend who was an engineer for one of the big three automakers for a number of years. Every year they would have an annual test session where they would take a random passenger vehicle or minivan (no pickups or big suvs) off the line, drive it down to Death Valley, outfit it with all sorts of sensors, and then hitch it to special flatbed trailer loaded with 10,000 pounds of sand. Then they would take it to their favourite 10 mile / 2000 vertical foot elevation climb and there, in 110 degree heat they'd stand on the gas and not let up til they reached the top. Then they'd do it again, and again, and again, and again...for a week straight. It was exhausting he said. He couldn't even use the cruise control because they wouldn't stay engaged at WOT. The official objective was to study the heat dissapation of oil and coolant using a variety of cooler designs but really what the guys down there hoped to do was to break the engine or transmission -- preferably both. They never did. Oh they blew some hoses and pretty good but the basic drivetrains were just fine. And these were regular production vehicles without towing packages.
Point is, I think today's vehicles could probably regularly pull many, many times their rated towing weight without undue harm to the driveline.
Now, unibody strength AND driveline...
Myself I will admit to pulling three times the rated load up steep launch ramps with my Honda CRV many times a year for over ten years. Then for good measure, I haul the boat several miles along a bumpy, hilly, pothole riddled private road to it's storage spot where it sits when we're not at the lake. The vehicle still runs flawlessly with over a quarter million kilometers on it. Original clutch too. The hitch is attached just as maflar outlines - with bolts through the pan under floor because there simply isn't a frame to tie into. There is zero sign of flexing, rippling, or any other damage. (I did upgrade the ball to a 5000 lb rating). Now, luckily I don't need to do this towing on public roads but I believe it backs up my argument that, at least with a quality vehicle, the tow rating is probably way understated from strictly "break the vehicle" point of view. Thankfully I now have a tractor to do all this launching and retrieving at the lake and soon I'll probably just install a marine railway so I don't even need the vehicle.
My humble opinion is if your vehicle is rated to tow a thousand, you can probably handle the thousand...
