Towing Capacity and Ball Weight Compared: Utes, SUVs and Vans

Towing capacity is the number every brochure leads with and the number least likely to be the one that stops you. The limits that actually bind a loaded rig are the tow ball download, which eats your payload, and the GCM, which quietly decides that you cannot have maximum tow and maximum load at the same time. This page puts all five published figures side by side for every ute, van and SUV of 4,400mm and longer on Australian sale that publishes a braked towing rating: braked towing, unbraked towing, tow ball download, GVM and GCM.

Every figure is read live from our database and printed as the manufacturer publishes it. Nothing on this page is calculated into existence. Where a maker publishes no ball weight or no GCM, the cell says No data, because a blank reads as zero and a 10 per cent estimate reads as a fact.

The qualifier in that first paragraph is doing real work, so it is worth stating plainly rather than hiding in a method note. 21 nameplates in these body styles publish no braked rating anywhere in our data, so there is no row to put in a table, and they are named in full further down rather than quietly left out. A page arguing that a missing figure must be shown as missing cannot make its own missing figures disappear.

What tow ball weight actually constrains

Tow ball download is the vertical load the coupling puts on the back of the tow vehicle. It does two things at once, and both of them are easy to miss. First, it is carried mass: the ball weight sits on the car, counts towards your GVM and comes straight out of your payload. Three adults and a 350kg ball is close to 590kg before the tray or boot has anything in it. Second, it is a separate published ceiling with nothing to do with the towing rating.

That second point is where the class splits. Of the 47 nameplates here rated at 3,500kg braked, 42 publish a ball limit, and 35 of those publish 350kg. The rest do not. 7 of them publish under 300kg: BMW X5 at 140kg, BMW X7 at 140kg, Porsche Cayenne at 140kg, Land Rover Range Rover Sport at 150kg, Volkswagen Crafter at 150kg, Ford Transit at 200kg, Volkswagen Touareg at 280kg. A 3,500kg rating paired with a 140kg ball limit is a different vehicle from a 3,500kg rating paired with 350kg. Australian caravans typically load 8 to 12 per cent of their mass onto the ball, so the ball limit, not the tow rating, is what decides how big a van you can legally hitch. Work your own trailer through the planner rather than applying a percentage to a brochure number.

One thing this page will not do is fill in a missing ball weight with 10 per cent of the tow rating. It is a tempting shortcut because it is often close, which is exactly the problem: 55 per cent of on-sale rows with both figures already sit at exactly 10 per cent, so an inferred one would be invisible in the table and indistinguishable from a measured one. Missing is missing.

Utes and cab-chassis

32 nameplates, highest braked rating first. Every figure in a row belongs to the single variant named under the model, so the tow rating and the ball weight cannot come from different cars.

Large SUVs

68 nameplates measuring 4,800mm or longer. The interesting comparison here is not the tow rating but what sits behind it. Hold the rating still and look at the 25 large SUVs rated at exactly 3,500kg: the headline is identical on all of them, yet the 22 that publish a ball limit run from 140kg to 350kg, and the 17 that publish a GCM run from 5,900kg to 7,174kg. Those are the two columns that decide what the rating is worth to you.

Mid-size SUVs

98 nameplates between 4,400mm and 4,799mm long. Ratings here run from 500kg to 3,500kg, and 51 of the 98 publish no GCM at all, which is itself the finding: this is the class where a buyer has the least published information to plan a rig with.

Vans and buses

27 nameplates. Vans are the weakest-covered group on the page: most publish a braked rating and a GVM, and only a minority publish a ball weight at all.

The GCM trap: why maximum tow and maximum load do not coexist

GCM is the ceiling on the whole rig, vehicle plus trailer, and it is set independently of both GVM and the braked rating. Subtract the braked rating from the GCM and you have the most the vehicle itself may weigh while it is towing its maximum. On most mainstream dual cabs and large SUVs that figure sits below the vehicle's own GVM, and the difference is carrying capacity you paid for and cannot use.

Of the 66 utes and large SUVs here that publish both GVM and GCM, 37 give up some of their GVM at maximum braked tow and 29 do not. The table below is every one of them, biggest squeeze first. The two inputs are both published ceilings and the subtraction stores nothing: it is the same arithmetic the planner runs, printed out.

"Vehicle allowed at max tow" is GCM minus the braked rating, both as published. "GVM you give up" is the published GVM minus that. None in that column means the GCM is generous enough that the GVM binds first, which is the comfortable case. Vehicles that publish no GCM cannot appear in this table at all: that is 98 of the 225 rows on this page.

The 100kg ball-weight caution

Every 100kg tow-ball cell on this page carries a dagger. As of 23 September 2026, 673 rows across 22 makes in our whole catalogue hold a tow ball download of exactly 100kg, 166 of them on cars currently on sale, a clustering our audit has not finished explaining. 28 of the 180 published ball figures in these tables are among them. We print the stored value rather than hiding it, because a suspected figure is worth flagging and not worth deleting. Until the audit closes, treat a 100kg cell as a prompt to check the build plate rather than as a settled limit.

A second flag: ADR caps an unbraked trailer at 750kg in Australia, which is why almost every unbraked figure in the tables is exactly 750kg. That is the legal ceiling, not something the vehicle earned. Two on-sale rows store a figure above it, both of them Mazda CX-6e. Because each nameplate is represented by a single row, 1 of those rows reaches these tables, carrying a double dagger and its held figure rather than a value clipped back to the legal ceiling. Some vehicles publish less than 750kg, and those are real constraints worth reading if you tow an unbraked box trailer or a small boat.

One more disagreement we are not going to paper over. Three rows rated at 3,500kg publish a 140kg ball limit (BMW X5, BMW X7 and Porsche Cayenne) while the BMW X6 row publishes 350kg against the same rating. Both cannot describe the same class of tow bar. Each row prints what it holds and the disagreement sits in our audit queue; harmonising them to look tidy would be inventing a figure.

How this page is built, and what it does not know

• Source. The 1,418 rows currently flagged on sale in Australia, read live from our database, paginated so nothing is lost to the 1,000-row cap.
• Groups. Body style decides the table. SUVs are split on their own published overall length, 4,800mm and over being large, because the segment label on most SUV rows is the single word "SUV" and cannot separate a RAV4 from a LandCruiser. An SUV with no published length is in neither SUV table.
• One row per nameplate. The variant with the highest published braked rating, tie-broken by how many of the other figures that same row publishes. The variant is named so you can check it. Two nameplates appear in two tables, which is why the 225 rows cover 223 nameplates: the VW Crafter is sold as both a van and a cab chassis, and the Porsche Macan's GTS publishes 4,805mm against its siblings' 4,784mm, putting one variant either side of the large-SUV line.
• Coverage of what is here. All 225 rows publish a braked rating. 203 publish an unbraked figure, 180 publish a tow ball download and only 127 publish a GCM. The 98 without a GCM are the rows where the most important towing question on this page cannot be answered at all, and that gap is reported rather than filled.
• The planner. 40 of the 225 rows carry no Load it link, because TowingSorted cannot currently select those cars. The link is gated on the planner's own vehicle list rather than on an assumption about it, so a link can never open the planner on a car other than the one it names.

What is missing from these tables

Four groups of vehicles sit inside this page's body styles and outside its tables. Naming them is the point: an absence that is counted is a gap, and an absence that is not is a silent claim of completeness.

• 21 nameplates publish no braked towing rating at all. Not a zero and not a low figure, simply nothing on record, so there is no row to rank. They are: Audi Q3, Audi Q3 Sportback, BMW iX3, BYD Sealion 7, Bentley Bentayga, Cadillac LYRIQ, Cadillac Optiq, Cadillac Vistiq, Chery Tiggo 7, Chery Tiggo 8 Super Hybrid, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Geely EX5, Geely Starray EM-i, Genesis GV60, Hyundai IONIQ 5 N, Hyundai Mighty Electric, Leapmotor B10, Lotus Eletre, Mercedes-Benz eVito, Mitsubishi Pajero, Zeekr 7X. For these the honest answer to "how much can it tow" is that nobody has published one, which is a different answer from zero and a very different answer from 3,500kg.
• 7 nameplates record a braked rating of zero, which is our data saying not rated to tow rather than saying nothing: Chery E5, Chery Tiggo 7 Super Hybrid, Ford e-Transit, GAC Aion V, GAC Emzoom, Lexus UX, Subaru Uncharted. A zero is a real statement, but it is neither a capacity to rank nor a missing figure, so it is named here instead of printed in a column.
• 43 SUV nameplates are shorter than 4,400mm and fall below the mid-size floor this page uses. Small SUVs are a different towing question from the one this page answers, so they are excluded by the length rule rather than mixed into the mid-size table.
• 1 SUV nameplate publishes no overall length, so there is no honest way to place it in the large or mid table. Guessing the class from the badge is exactly the shortcut the length rule exists to avoid.

The short version

• Read the ball limit before the tow rating. It is the number that decides how big a caravan you can hitch, and among 3,500kg-rated vehicles it ranges from 140kg to 350kg.
• Ball weight is payload. It comes off what you can carry, so a 350kg ball on a 900kg payload leaves you far less tray or boot than the brochure implies.
• Check GCM before you commit. 37 of the 66 utes and large SUVs that publish one cannot be at both maximum tow and maximum GVM.
• 750kg is the unbraked line. Above it your trailer needs its own brakes, whatever the tow vehicle is rated for.
• Do the sum for your rig, not the class. TowingSorted checks your load against all five published limits at once and tells you which one binds first.

All towing, mass and tow ball figures are manufacturer-published and read live from our database at build time. Ratings vary by variant, drivetrain, transmission and tow bar fitment, and an aftermarket tow bar carries its own rating which may be lower than the vehicle's. Check the compliance plate and the tow bar plate on your own build before planning a load.