I mean, it has a valid use case - you have a car with no towing capacity, like a sports car, and you have a caravan that you use a couple times a year for vacation or whatever. Normally you’d need to own a truck as well, or instead of the sports car daily a truck for the few times you actually need it. With this thing, you could “haul” your caravan with anything, and then when you get to your camp site or whatever you’d have your normal car to drive around at the location with. Shit, you could ride a motorcycle to your campsite with your caravan following you, that would be cool as hell.
But you have the obvious safety and security issues and potential for technical malfunctions, all of which would be super dangerous with no second layer of protection. You have the issue of leaving your caravan behind at the site while you drive your car to the shop and your shit getting stolen. You have a second power train to worry about and a second vehicle to maintain and fuel (or in this case charge, which might take a minute, especially if you are also driving an EV with it, then you’ve got 2 EV’s to charge at each stop).
But the obvious man…if the software tether fails, or freezes, or locks up, or has any kind of issue, somebody is gonna die. It will never, ever get approved.
We’ve (US folks) been told for so long that anything other than a truck can’t haul something for so long that it’s just ingrained at this point. I don’t know how we’d go about undoing that.
I mean, it has a valid use case - you have a car with no towing capacity, like a sports car, and you have a caravan that you use a couple times a year for vacation or whatever. Normally you’d need to own a truck as well, or instead of the sports car daily a truck for the few times you actually need it. With this thing, you could “haul” your caravan with anything, and then when you get to your camp site or whatever you’d have your normal car to drive around at the location with. Shit, you could ride a motorcycle to your campsite with your caravan following you, that would be cool as hell.
But you have the obvious safety and security issues and potential for technical malfunctions, all of which would be super dangerous with no second layer of protection. You have the issue of leaving your caravan behind at the site while you drive your car to the shop and your shit getting stolen. You have a second power train to worry about and a second vehicle to maintain and fuel (or in this case charge, which might take a minute, especially if you are also driving an EV with it, then you’ve got 2 EV’s to charge at each stop).
But the obvious man…if the software tether fails, or freezes, or locks up, or has any kind of issue, somebody is gonna die. It will never, ever get approved.
You don’t NEED a truck. Here in Germany, VW Golfs or Škoda Octavians tow camping trailers all the time.
We’ve (US folks) been told for so long that anything other than a truck can’t haul something for so long that it’s just ingrained at this point. I don’t know how we’d go about undoing that.