FYI everything was wired up yesterday, and we did our first towing test last night, 300lbs of tongue weight and the full 3100lb trailer. Unfortunately we were limited by a trailer issue (one brake drum got to 250 degrees after a 20 mile around-town trip at no more than 40mph), so I am in the process of investigating that before I do a highway test run. It is a 40-50 year old trailer with welded on backing plates, no parts available, so it is a challenge to retrofit new parts, but I think I found the issue and will try again this weekend. The trailer is just a placeholder until I figure out if the concept will work, then I will buy a new superlight 650lb aluminum car hauler.
Won't say too much yet about my testing, but as a sneak peak, the regen braking was impressive, and under normal driving conditions, my useless trailer brakes did not matter at all, the car was fully capable of stopping the trailer on its own, even on my very steep route that I took. I am a racing instructor at Laguna Seca, so when I get the occasional chance I rip the Niro around the track to test thermal capacities, and it has been very impressive so far. More impressive than that, is I have been monitoring the KW trace on the EV interface, and I have seen a full 150KW of regen braking at high speed. Very curious to know how efficient it is at putting that 150KW back into the battery? Does anyone have any numbers on regen efficiency for the Niro?
To respond to some others:
Yes TFL videos are interesting with their Model X, but they tow brick-like horse trailers and do 70MPH in the process lol. So we are hoping we can do better than that. Fortunately the speed limit for towing in California is 55mph so we are limited by that anyways, and being that we are towing with a small vehicle, we are going to be sensible and stick to that speed anyways. We should be able to achieve higher efficiency than the Model X given all equal variables, the Niro is a smaller car with a higher MPGe rating in the first place.
As for temperatures, yes this should be interesting. The car is supposed to enter a "limp mode" when things get too hot. I will continue my testing at Laguna Seca and see if I will hit that threshold. I would love to monitor battery/motor/inverter temps, so let me know if someone knows how? OBD2?