I did not know there was any alternative to a ball bolted on the car (or an easy-remove ball) until I watched that video.
But the 2" socket system looks on the face of it, far superior to the British way - not least with bike racks like that, where it is not relying on an ungodly amount of friction to clamp a high leverage unit to a round ball!
Plus it is inherently removable...
2" reciever hitch. Too big for most cars here :-) The US equivalent for normal cars is a 1.25" hitch, which has some of the same advantages. And you get a ball thing to stick into the receiver to tow normal stuff.
I'm not sure a reciever would work well with most cars these days though
- think of where the plastic for the bumper needs to be.
That's very interesting :)
Having seen it, I just had a moment of "that's so obvious - why did we never adopt that". Regarding the bumper, most need some sort of cutout or trim to take a towball anyway - so I don't see a disadvantage there.
It was partly in connection with bike racks that clamp to the ball - you are relying on one hell of a lot of friction to resist upto 240Nm of torque (that's a fully loaded Thule one, noseweight 80kg, max bike load
60kg and assuming the centre of gravity is about 0.3m away from the towball.And that's the static load - gawd knows what the dynamic loads are. Several times at least.
It was at this point that I just thought a square socket mating was just so much better :)
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