Towbar Installation

No, and the one that applies is whichever is lower. Your vehicle has a maximum braked towing capacity set by the manufacturer, and the towbar has its own rating stamped on the compliance plate. Fitting a 3500kg bar to a vehicle rated at 2500kg does not give you 3500kg of capacity. There's also a third number that catches people out more often than either: towball download, the weight pressing straight down on the ball. It's typically around 10% of the trailer's loaded weight, and your vehicle has a separate maximum for it. A heavy van loaded nose-down can exceed download well before you're anywhere near the tow rating. We'll check all three against your vehicle before recommending a bar.

A fixed tongue is the simplest and usually the cheapest, and it stays on the car. That's fine on a work ute and less appealing on a European SUV where it sits below a body-coloured bumper. A detachable tongue pulls out when you're not towing, which tidies up the back of the car and stops you barking your shin on it in the driveway. A swan neck is a smoother single-piece design, common on newer vehicles and often the neatest visually. If you tow every weekend, fixed. If you tow twice a year and care how the car looks, detachable or swan neck.

It depends on the trailer's loaded weight. As a general rule in Australia, trailers up to 750kg need no brakes at all. Between 750kg and 2000kg they need brakes on at least one axle. Above 2000kg they need brakes on every wheel plus a breakaway system that applies the brakes if the trailer separates. Where the trailer uses electric brakes — which most vans above 2000kg do — you need a controller fitted in the tow vehicle to operate them. We supply and fit both proportional and time-based controllers, and we'll wire it properly rather than tapping into something convenient. Requirements vary by state, so tell us where the vehicle is registered.

On anything modern, yes. Older vehicles could be spliced into the tail light circuit, but current vehicles run can-bus systems where the lighting is monitored, and cutting into it causes fault codes, bulb-out warnings, or interference with parking sensors and trailer stability control. A vehicle-specific harness plugs into the factory connectors and talks to the car properly, so the vehicle knows a trailer is attached and behaves accordingly. We fit those as standard. You'll also want to decide between a 7-pin flat and a 12-pin connector — 12-pin carries the extra circuits for van brakes, a fridge and charging, so it's the usual choice for caravans.