Has anybody had any experience of using a mk3 for towing? If so, how good/bad are they? We've had a bit of a change around in our household car wise & the wife has ended up with a brand spanking new Polo. The idea then was for me to replace my mint Swartz black mk3 colour concept with something "more appropiate" as the family car & to tow our light 2 berth caravan (occasional weekends away) The problem is that i really dont want to sell the golf, so, is it feasable to get a detachable towbar fitted to the mk3 or do i have to part company with it. I'm sure i read somewhere that they're not very good for towing (too light) but i'm hoping somebody on here could enlighten me. Thanks, Jase
I suppose it depends on what the laden weight of your caravan is, but a big heavy 4x4 is always going to be better at towing
Most of it depends on the nose weight on the caravan. Need a set of scales under the jockey wheel to get this. With uprated rear shocks you should be ok if it's only a 2 berth van
Basically you can tow up to 85% of the kerb weight of the car (bar Land Rovers they can tow 3500kg ????) so a mk3 golf is how heavy (ball park 1200kg ?) therefore it can tow up to 1020kgs keeping in mind that all trailers over 750kg need to be braked. But I am assuming your caravan will be within these limits you should be fine to tow with it. The nose weight is the important thing to keep an eye on when towing as this will effect the balance but as I am guessing as you own a caravan you will know this any way? I dont know what you used to tow with but I would not stress towing a small caravan with a mk3. AND remember if it is a 8v then the torque will prove handy for towing.
Cheers guys, It is an 8v so all that torque should come in handy then. Going to do a bit more research into it but fingers crossed it's an option. Thanks for the imput
Having got my trailer license and having towed trailers (with horses in) and owning a Mk3 I wouldn't want to tow with it tbh. It would probably be fine until something went wrong and I would question how stable the Mk3 would be to keep the trailer/caravan steady if it started snaking for example SWB cars are generally never as safe towing then a LWB one - one of my horsey people used to tow a 1000kg trailer with a 700kg horse in a Mk4 and it never looked very stable.
I have towed a small caravan with a MK3 and to be honest wouldn't recommend it. It was the forst car I towed with, so didn't really know any better at the time, the weights seemed OK etc and although we never got nto any serious dificulties, there are deffinately better tow cars, bets I ever had was an 96 A4 avant TDI, the only car I could say that you could forget the van was there.
To be honest, the more I thought about it the more I started having doubts about stability, so i've bit the bullet & bought an Audi A4 s line avant, 1.8T (190 bhp). I had all intensions of getting a diesel because thats what I used to tow with, but this one is so mint, 69,500 miles, full history, etc etc at 5k, could say no. Now i'm looking at a way of keeping both................ Thanks for all your help & advice.
