I was helping someone park a truck which was towing a two-horse trailer.
The horses were still in it, so I recommended just backing up into the proper spot with my direction.
The driver told me that she didn’t want to do that because she had been told “backing up a fully-loaded trailer is rough on your transmission, because the truck is made for towing, not pushing.”
So, she unloaded the horses first, then I helped her back up.
Is this another case of farm “folk knowledge,” or is there something to it?
BTW, when the trailer is fully loaded, the horses make up about half of the total towed weight.
The gear ratio for reverse is usually the same as for 1st and it’s just another gear. Unless there’s some special feature of automatic transmissions that make reverse harder to use I don’t the see the difference.
The driver was mistaken. There’s no danger of damage to the transmission.
If you tried to drive 50 mph in reverse with a trailer hitched on I can see you might have some problems. But they’d still be more about control than structural damage (until you lost control, anyway).
If you want proof, tell her to read her owner’s manual. If there were any chance of mechanical damage, Ford (or whoever) would put a warning in there about not backing up with a loaded trailer. Otherwise they’d be liable for any damage that did occur. They’ve had too much experience to miss something as obvious as that.
“To do her justice, I can’t see that she could have found anything nastier to say if she’d thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.”
Dorothy L. Sayers Busman’s Honeymoon