Tow Car - What to buy?

[Aussie Mike]

Funny this tread should pop up again. I just updated my tow car/daily driver. The Land Rover was getting a bit long in the tooth so figured I'd update it before the KMs go too high. I've had it for about 4 years.

I replaced it with a Mercedes ML320 CDI. A bit more road oriented than the Discovery but I'd only taken it off road twice in the 4 years I've owned it. The ML could probably cope OK with where I took anyway.

The ML 320 CDI looks like a good tow car on paper but so far I've only towed the 6x4 trailer. It makes way more torque and HP than the land rover and has a 3500KG tow rating. the 3.0L turbo diesel motor actually makes more torque than the 5.0L V8 in the ML500 so it should be good. 7 speed auto transmission is nice and smooth too and keeps the motor in the thick of it's torque. Leaves the Land Rover for dead at the lights.

It's much nicer on the road than the Land Rover and gets better fuel economy too. Quite surprising actually, it does about 9L/100 on the run to work every day. That's freeway/city mix.

Cheers

[spookypt]

Hey mike. My factory gm had the ml500 v8. Lovely car but when the air bag suspension fault sounds it's 20k if it's out of warranty!! Happened 3 times in the time we had it! I finally settled on a fpv 310 pursuit ute for round town and an f250 for towing the car and other heavy stuff. And love it! Spookypt

[Aussie Mike]

Hi Spook,

What year ML was it? the W163 (pre 2005) was known to have a few problems. The updated W164 (2005 to current) is supposed to have fixed Mercedes quality issues and is supposed to be pretty reliable. I did a lot of reading the forums and reviews before I settled on one.

I was actually thinking about getting the Porsche Cayenne Turbo for a while. I figured I could live with the looks for the sake of that performance (Keep my eyes closed till I got in it). Common sense prevailed and the ML was a bit more practical.

The Pursuit is a fun car I had a Tickford Pursuit 250 before the Land Rover. That was the last of the Windsor motors and the hottest one they made. They stroked them to 347 cubes from the factory. It was a laugh to drive as it didn't have traction control. That was an odd omission by the factory in my opinion since the sedan version had it and the ute was probably more likely to loose traction.

Which motor did you get in the F250?

Cheers

[spookypt]

Mike the pursuit is really a hp go Go cart. Not good for much practically but heaps of grunt and I love utes so perfect for work. The ml I think was an 05. Problem was always a faulty relay that caused the compressor to run all the time and eventually poo itself and the techs could never fully fix the issue for some reason. I went the petrol as apart from service and parts costs I just hate diesels. Spookypt