So, it was time to purchase a caravan by the end of 2021. We had gone through several lock downs due to COVID-19 and we could not wait for the ability to travel again.
We were told by purchasing a caravan and towing requires a bit of homework. We did a considerable amount of research to make sure we have the right combination of the caravan and tow vehicle.
- We did not want to spend too much on the caravan. The budget we allocated for the caravan was about 15000$
- We had about 30,000 to spend on the tow vehicle.
We did not want to take any loans or spend more than the figures mentioned above so we choose Mitsubishi outlander for towing.
Tow vehicle: Mitsubishi Outlander Diesel AWD
Tow vehicle towing capacity: 2000KG
Tow ball weight limit: 200KG for diesel version.
Other options we considered were Toyota Parrado as it was a bit roomier and could tow 2500 but the car (of same year) would have costed close to or more than what we spent on the van and car above. We were not really going to do much off-roading anyway, so we decided to go with this combination.
For the first caravan we wanted something easy to tow and under 2.1 meters to fit through the garage door. We ended up buying an old Jayco StarCraft pop top.
Caravan tare weight: 1250 KG
Caravan ball weight: 170 KG
We knew we would need to buy some sort of weight distribution kit to make it a bit easier and safer to tow. We purchased Hayman Reese 550 weight distribution kit.
