alt Hacker News> and you can pull a huge one with ANY car, you don’t need truck, just modified mirrors
So pretty much like everywhere outside the US?
Here in the UK it's not uncommon to pull a 1500kg caravan with a bog standard Ford Focus, without any problems at all, and well over two tonnes on a twin-axle one with something like a Volvo V60.
People come from all over Europe to holiday here with their caravans, and are towing them at "realistic Autobahn speeds" behind perfectly ordinary cars.
It just seems to be the US where you need a 7.5 tonner to pull a trailer the size of a suitcase.
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European caravan trailers are generally designed with a much lower tongue weight, like only 4%. This reduces strain on the tow vehicle at the cost of reduced stability. It is ridiculously dangerous to tow such a trailer at full "Autobahn speeds". You might be able to get away with it on a straight road if nothing goes wrong but a sudden maneuver or even a strong gust of wind can lead to uncontrolled oscillation and a roll-over crash.
https://www.theautopian.com/heres-the-physics-behind-tongue-...
US trailers are generally designed with something like 10-15% tongue weight which allows for much higher dynamic stability but also requires a much stronger tow vehicle. As usual there is no free lunch in mechanical engineering.
Those are small trailers that you can pull with small cars in the US. The US has many RVs that need much larger trucks to pull them as well. I don't have much autobahn experience, but I don't recall ever seeing a RV type trailer like are somewhat common in the US.
Even if your car can pull the trailer, that doesn't mean you should. If the trailer is oversized the car and engine can pull it - but you need something much bigger/heaver to control the load if anything goes wrong. More than one person has had their car roll because they were towing a large trailer at high speed and a wind gust pushed them into the ditch. If they were towing at city street speeds they would have been okay, but not autobahn speeds.
You don't need a 7.5 tonner to pull a small trailer. However you do need to carefully check the tow rating, bad things happen if the tow vehicle is too small. You do need a 7.5 tonner to pull a large trailer though.