Can The Hyundai Palisade Tow a boat?

What is a man but a miserable little pile of desires, and what is an American man if one of those desires is not a boat. But whether that boat is within your means or not, you’ll need a way to get it from your home to the water.

As long as your trailer has its own brakes, your Hyundai Palisade can tow up to 5,000 lbs of boat. Most boats fit handily in the 800 to 4,000 lbs range, but if your boat is heavier than that you’ll need to find a truck to move it. Otherwise, a Palisade should do the job just fine.

Maybe that’s good news for you, maybe it isn’t. Why does the trailer need to have its own brakes? And why can’t the Palisade tow more than 5,000 lbs?

Hyundai Palisade Towing Capacity

The Hyundai Palisade is a pretty big car. An SUV even. So it makes sense that it would be able to tow a bit more than your average station wagon or Honda Civic.

It isn’t a truck though, so a lot of larger trailers can be too much for them to quite manage. That being said, 5,000 lbs is no joke, and it seems like no matter how many people are actually in the car the towing capacity remains the same.

Is it possible to get a higher towing capacity out of the car? If you’re an engineer, you probably can figure it out. I would say that the average person probably shouldn’t mess around with their car to try and mod it to increase its towing capacity, even if you do have a larger boat.

Of course, this all depends on whether or not your Hyundai Palisade has the 7 pin towing extension. Most Palisades do, but some don’t. For Palisades that have the ordinary 4 pin attachment, the limit is 1,653lbs, the same as the standard car trailer.

However, this is an issue with the connection system and not the SUV’s construction.

You can go check the back of your Palisade to see if you have the towing attachment, but if you don’t you can probably just get it added now. The important thing that this attachment does is allow the driver to control the trailer’s brakes.

Trailers With Brakes

So why do the trailers need brakes then? And when do I need them?

Trailer brakes serve a couple of useful purposes. The more obvious of the two is that they help the trailer to stop around the same time the car does, since for a lot of heavier trailers the car’s brake system isn’t strong enough to stop both the car and the trailer.

The other purpose it serves is to give the trailer the ability to stop if it accidentally comes disconnected from the car. If the trailer didn’t have any brakes it could easily end up flying into traffic if it were to de-attach from the car that was pulling it.

When will the Hyundai Palisade need the trailer to have brakes? The Hyundai Palisade can tow anything under 1,653lbs without needing the trailer to have brakes. Anything above that will need them.

The more knowledgeable among you will have realized that legally speaking, the macimum weight that is allowed to be towed without trailer brakes is 3,000lbs.

Go ahead, have your Hyundai Palisade tow 3,000lbs of boat without brakes on the trailer. I bet that by the end of the trip you’ll probably still have either a car or a boat.

How Heavy Are Boats?

The weight of a boat while it’s on land is usually referred to as its dry weight. This is the weight that matters while the boat is being towed.

The weight of the boat usually depends on what the boat is made to do. For instance, little fishing boats usually don’t weigh between 1,500 lbs to 2,500 lbs. Your Hyundai Palisade could definitely tow that.

Big sailboats, on the other hand, can weigh between 4,000 and 8,000 lbs. Maybe your Hyundai Palisade can tow one, but probably not.

There are a few kinds of boats that are definitely too big. Houseboats can weigh between 20,000 and 200,000 lbs. That’s just too big for a Hyundai Palisade to move.

What about a Pontoon? 3,000 to 5,000 lbs. Seems doable. You can probably pull that boat.

A skiff? Do you want to know about a skiff? Less than a thousand pounds. Pull that sucker! Just tow it! You can!

You know what kind of boat you have better than I do. You can figure out how much it weighs by searching the model of your boat followed by the word weight on google. Then you will know for yourself whether or not you can tow it with a Hyundai Palisade.

Once again, the Palisade can only tow heavy things (above 1,650lbs) if it has the 7 pin attachment that allows it access to a braking controller. Don’t try to pull any of these boats that fall into the range of 1,650 to 5,000lbs unless you have that attachment.

Exactly What Can a Hyundai Palisade Tow?

What can a Hyundai Palisade tow? Anything that weighs less than 5,000lbs. I weigh about 200lbs. The Hyundai Palisade could tow about twenty-five of me if you tied us all up really tight and attached us to a trailer.

Have an RV trailer that you need to tow? Your Hyundai Palisade can tow that. Maybe. It depends on whether the RV is less than 5,000lbs or not. If it is, the Palisade can tow it. If not, the Hyundai Palisade can’t tow it. Check on your model’s website if you aren’t sure.

What about another car? Could the Palisade tow that? Yep. It could tow that. Most cars weigh under 5,000lbs, including other SUVs and pickup trucks.

Could the Hyundai Palisade tow another Hyundai Palisade? Yes. The Hyundai Palisade weighs between 4,127lbs and 4,387lbs. 4,387 is less than 5,000. That means that the Hyundai Palisade could tow exactly 1.14 other Hyundai Palisades.

Is It Good to Tow Heavy Stuff All the Time?

I couldn’t find any evidence that the pressure put on the system by towing was really significant as long as what you’re towing is within its towing capacity.

It seems to be able to handle the extra weight exactly the way you’d expect a car that had been designed to tow up to 5,000lbs of stuff to handle it, which is to say just fine.

The one thing I might worry about is human error. This is true no matter what vehicle you’re towing with, but towing a heavy thing definitely changes the way the car steers a little bit. Turns need to be wide, you need time to brake, that kind of stuff.

It’s easy for people to forget all of this, and so it’s entirely possible that an inexperienced driver could accidentally crash the car and do damage to it that way. Otherwise, towing seems to be completely safe with the Hyundai Palisade.

I can’t stress this enough, I am talking about the version of the Hyundai Palisade that has the 7 pin hitch attachment that allows it access to trailers with breaks. Without this attachment, the Hyundai is no better at towing than any other car.

How Does The Palisade Compare to Other Towing Vehicles?

Compared to other SUVs, the Palisade is something of a superstar. It’s far more reliable able to deal with mid-weight trailers than most SUVs.

The only SUV that can really challenge the Hyundai Palisade is probably the Kia Telluride. Kia claims that the Telluride has a 5,000lbs towing capacity. Both cars are from around the same time period (2019-2021) and they’re both supposed to be pretty good at towing.

The biggest difference between the two is the recommended tongue weight. The Palisade has a tongue weight of 750lbs, which is generally enough to support 5,000lbs of stuff without becoming unstable.

The Telluride, on the other hand, has a max tongue weight of only 350lbs, which puts its stable carrying capacity at only about 3,500lbs. That’s still no slouch when it comes to SUVs, but it also isn’t even clost to the towing power offered by the Hyundai Palisade.

Compared to a pickup truck? It just isn’t very good. If you’re looking for a towing vehicle with the extra utility of being able to carry a whole family, that’s where the Palisade shines. If you’re looking for a vehicle that can tow upwards of 10,000lbs you’ll want a pickup truck.

The Ram 3500 Heavy Duty, for instance, can tow a trailer up to 35,100lbs. It could probably tow several boats if that were something that you wanted to do.

The Ram 3500 is on the stronger end when it comes to pickup trucks, but it isn’t unusual for a pickup to be able to tow over 15,000lbs at a time.

The fact is that towing is a secondary feature of the Palisade. It is extremely good at towing the things that it’s built to pull. Anything higher than that is going to be dangerous.