Can an EV tow a caravan? Hopefully not | Opinion

Occasionally, if I don’t see them coming and run away first, I will be confronted by someone who likes caravans and wants to complain to me about electric vehicles not being able to tow them – or at least not far enough to hurl them off a cliff, where they belong.

While some people think it’s a problem, or somehow ruining the weekends of all Australians, that no current electric vehicle would be realistically capable of towing one of those modern caravans that looks like a school demountable on wheels, I think it’s fantastic.

Hopefully, nothing will change, diesel utes will be banned, petrol will run out and, unable to tow their unfeasibly ugly eyesores out onto public roads, all caravans will be crushed, or smelted down, and the world will simply be an infinitely better place.

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Now, in the past, this kind of anti-van-man rant, coming from me, would be entirely unjustified and just a case of spraying hatred without really knowing what I’m talking about, first hand, just like everything I’ve ever written about such as cyclists who wear lycra (come to think of it, I bet most people who own caravans are also cyclists, their kind of rampant disregard for other motorists is such a shared value).

But I am now on firm ground when I say that absolutely everything about caravanning sucks, and that I would rather hammer hot nails, or even snake teeth dipped in poison, through my penis than ever attempt to tow, or reverse, or even sleep in a caravan ever again.

I’m not going to identify the magazine that somehow tricked me into wasting a whole weekend of my life on this giant, festering shit show of an awful idea, because I quite like the editor, despite him being to blame for my suffering.

Suffice it to say that I am an idiot, and I should never have agreed to it (I blame my daughter, who professed an admiration for caravans recently – I was mainly trying to cure her of this malady). The idea was that I – someone who has never towed anything – would borrow a caravan, head to a Holiday Park and discover that I am actually 40 years older than I thought I was, and fall hopelessly in love with the idea of being a Grey Nomad (funny word that, after trying it I think they should be called Grey Yesmads).

Things went wrong from the start, when the van I was asked to tow – again, I’ve never tried this before – turned out to be the largest structure ever to sit on wheels, so large, in fact, that it made a Mardi Gras float look like a shopping trolley. 

The nice salesman who had to explain to me how a caravan worked, looked genuinely worried for me, and wondered aloud, as I did, why they’d chosen to give me such a McWhopper. He politely compared this to someone who’s never been on a hike setting off to climb Everest. Naked.

By this stage I was shitting not just bricks but entire barbecues, which might have explained why I was sweating so profusely as I headed out the very narrow looking gates of the van dealer and out onto public roads (I was driving a diesel ute, which, despite being dwarfed by the caravan the way I’m dwarfed by Luc Longley, somehow managed to achieve 100km/h, sometimes, down hills, while also “achieving” the burning of 17 litres per 100km of diesel).

Let’s just say it, towing sucks. Not only is it stressful and difficult, but when you hit a bumpy section of road you get to experience it twice, violently, as the caravan shakes your vehicle like an angry dog thrashing a chew toy.

Freeways are bad enough – particularly when the wind tries to throw you into the scenery – but at least you have a slow lane to hide in. Turn off onto a single-lane road and you quickly feel the kind of hatred that usually comes off me when I’m stuck behind any giant asshole in a caravan who won’t pull over and let me past (at least I know why now, it’s too stupidly hard to get the thing off the road).

After hating myself for some time I finally arrived at the Caravanning Resort (can the word “Resort” sue these people for misuse? Enquiring lawyers want to know), where I was forced to attempt to reverse something the size of a road train, only heavier, into a spot that my photographer found pleasing.

I hope you’ve not tried this, dear reader, but it’s like patting your tummy and rubbing your head while someone twists both your arms behind your back and punches you in the face. People are happy to help, of course, but I think most of them give you the wrong advice, just for fun.

Eventually, I got to spend the night in this grain-silo sized caravan, which somehow manages to be a reverse Tardis – blocky and unattractive on the outside, and somehow smaller than it seems on the inside. 

Theoretically, the van had a heater, but if you turned it on you would go deaf in moments. And the hot water didn’t work. Nor the TV. I woke at 5am so cold that I feared I’d already been buried in a coffin made of tin, then remember that, no, my situation was worse than that, I was in a caravan.

Now, there are some people who pretend that they love caravans and towing them, and to these people I would point out that my van cost more than $90,000, which adds up to an impressive number of nights in a hotel.

But the fact is, I think they’re all lying. No-one can actually enjoy this, nor call anything associated with caravanning a “holiday”. 

My theory is that caravanists are all secret masochists and if they weren’t out ruining the roads for the rest of us, they’d be at home driving hot nails through their penises. 

No, EVs can’t really tow caravans, yet, and I hope they never can.