@IaM-Ray asked a very good question: "CAN I HIT the car.... when doing a 90 degree turn(?) My OCD question would be; what if I have a "Duh" moment and forget to remember No 90ºs?"
Well, that depends on a lot of things, for instance;
- how wide is your tow vehicle in proportion to the distance from the tow vehicle to the towed vehicle?
- How wide is the towed vehicle?
- How long is the tongue of the tow bar (from the nose of the towed car to the hitch ball)?
- How tight is the turn - REALLY?
#'s 1 and 2 are what they are. All you can do is hook everything up and try successively tighter turns at very low speeds in a parking lot to see when anything is getting close and remember what that turning radius is (remember what you saw in the rear view mirrors just before catastrophe was about to strike. Don't go beyond that).
Just to let you know - You have to make a really artificially tight turn to see any tow-er vs. towee interference. Most people don't turn that tightly.
There is an obvious relationship between #1&2 (car widths) and #3, the length of the tow bar, and it is called Geometry (Thank you Euclid). Longer bars give you a little more turning room, at the expense of longer overall length (tow-er plus towee), but the difference isn't all that much. Certainly not enough to consider extending the tow bar by a couple of feet to gain a couple of additional degrees of turning radius that you'll pro'bly never need.
Which brings us to #4: How often do you think you're really going to need to do an extremely tight 90º turn? The answer is, almost never and the almost part is when you're approaching 90º but fall a few degrees short, like 100º. Why? Because you've scoped out the terrain beforehand and plotted out the best way through the parking lot to avoid that sort of thing. If you can make it through a parking lot with lanes of 2-way traffic, you have enough room to pull through with a car in tow on a bar, simple as that. Just remember to never, never back up.
If you HAVE to back up, release the tow bar, drive the damn car over to some place where you can hook back up and tow it on outa there! Besides - If I can push my 2,000# Speedster out of my garage and back in by hand, you can push your 1,800# car a few feet in a parking lot.
I have pulled a trailer (which is a damn sight longer than a Speedster on a tow bar) around gas stations, truck stops (those are the best!), restaurants (Pancho Villa's in Fredrickburg, VA, Peking Gardens in Hagerstown, WVA in a crowded strip mall, not to mention a dozen or so Dunkin Donuts), countless Holiday and Hampton Inns and a few Marriott Courtyards, etc., and NEVER had an instance when I had to back up, even though I could do so without incident. You can ALWAYS plot a course around a parking lot to safely navigate it for a parking spot AND navigate the hell outa there in the morning.
Don't over think this. It's just a car on a tow bar. Take a few rides around your neighborhood with it to see how it feels/performs, the branch out for a longer ride and pull though a mall's parking lot, then a gas station. If you get through all that and feel comfortable, you'll be ready for the open road. Once you get on an interstate (or whatever you call them up in Cananada - Inter-Provincial?) it's easy - you just keep going straight ahead and change lanes once in a while. Its when you get off the highway that the terror starts.
Remember, my pickup was 21 feet long (That's 6-1/2 metres for you Canucks) and the trailer was another 21 feet for a total of 42+ feet (Holy Cow! Was it really that long?) which is one helluva lot longer than a Ford Explorer towing a Speedster on a bar and I never had any trouble maneuvering it! And it's always fun to pull a trailer through a Dunkin Donuts drive-through - Done it more than a few times....... ![rolleyes](https://www.speedsterowners.com/static/images/graemlins/icon_rolleyes.gif)