This section is less a commentary on the Black Series per se as it is living with any sort of decent-sized camping trailer, but they’re all lessons learned from spending a week hauling what amounted to a wheeled tiny house across a thousand miles of America.
For one thing, hauling a trailer means you should be prepared to see some terrifying new figures from your trip computer’s fuel economy reading. Adding more than three tons of mass to a truck engine’s workload is bound to make it work harder, but modern pickup motors are potent enough that acceleration is still brisk enough to
The bigger pain, in the long run, comes from the added drag that the trailer brings to the table. Even with the angled front end, the HQ19 presents a big, blocky surface to the wind, forcing the tow vehicle to fight hard to keep up (and also occasionally inducing some nerve-racking oscillations in the trailer). Drag increases faster the quicker you go; jumping from 50 to 60 mph induces more drag than going from 40 to 50, and so forth, so the faster you drive, the faster your fuel economy goes down.
Every F-250 Tremor comes outfitted with the gnarly new Godzilla V8, a 7.3-liter naturally aspirated gasoline-fueled beast that cranks out 430 horses and 475 lb-ft. While normally two of my favorite phrases in the motoring world, though, naturally aspirated and gasoline-fueled are not exactly the ideal for hauling a trailer long distances at more than a mile above sea level.
Thing is, Wyoming interstate’s speed limit is 80 miles per hour, and plenty of cars (and even some semis) like to cruise 5-10 mph over the limit, much like anywhere else. Keep it at 65 for better fuel economy, and you’ll have every other vehicle on the road blasting by like you’re standing still — a scary proposition when about half of those vehicles are eighteen-wheelers.
As a result, the truck/trailer combo’s highway range wound up coming in at just a little over 200 miles. Add in the sporadic nature of gas stations in Wyoming — you can easily go 50 miles or more without seeing one — and the drive left me with a newfound appreciation for what EV drivers have to deal with on long sojourns.
Detaching and re-attaching the trailer — specifically the latter — is its own set of stressors. More than one person half-jokingly told my partner and me some variation of “hooking up trailers can lead to breakups,” and while our relationship made it through fine, it’s certainly easy to see why it could push an unstable marriage straight into divorce court.
Attaching the trailer is by far the trickier of the two, as it requires backing up your tow vehicle to align very precisely with the hitch — a task that requires a spotter (who, of course, is usually a significant other) to direct the driver in. Luckily, modern technology makes this far easier; the indicator line on the F-250’s rearview camera that tells you where the trailer hitch will be made lining it up easy. The hitch that makes the Black Series so capable off-road doesn’t make things easier; while most trailers simply need their hitch to be higher than the ball, the direct attachment of the HQ19 means the trailer and truck need to have their heights exactly matched. Still, the hydraulic jack of the trailer means it’s easy for the spotter to raise or lower it to match the truck on the fly.
