LDV T60 Trailrider 2019 Tow Test Review

There's plenty of choice if you want to buy a dual-cab ute to tow with, but here we’ve finally got the chance to test China’s latest towing ute hopeful, the new 2019 LDV T60 Trailrider.

The 2019 LDV T60 Trailrider is a limited-edition model (650 units) of the T60, but the guts of it is that LDV has taken its premium T60 Luxe ute and added 12 spoke 19in black wheels, black nudge bar, black sports bar and black side steps, lockable Mountain Top roller tonneau, black grille and Trailrider decals for the sides, rear and bonnet.

The icing on the cake is the Trailrider’s Walkinshaw locally tuned suspension, which boils down to shocks with different valving being bolted in at the factory. Springs and suspension settings are otherwise unchanged.

This premium Chinese ute costs just $38,937 drive away, which is way cheaper than the established brands in the ute market.

On the inside

The T60’s interior is large and comfortable to sit in for extended periods: the front seats offer plenty of support and the controls and instruments present no nasty surprises. Fit and finish is good overall.

However, the centre infotainment screen reflects too much in daylight and while around-view cameras are a nice thing to have, it would help if the display was higher resolution. The menus on the touchscreen are a bit clunky too, and on one occasion the screen froze. A ‘re-boot’ (stopping and restarting the vehicle) fixed the problem.

There's abundant rear head and leg room and the rear pew is not painfully upright like it is in some utes. Nice touches include a folding centre armrest with two cupholders and on the back of the centre console a 12v auxiliary port and air vents.

While the LED headlights' spread was excellent, they were hyperactive, constantly adjusting beam height as you drove down the road, even on fairly innocuous undulations.

Powering up

You can tell straight away driving the LDV solo that its 110kW and 360Nm is below par for the class. That doesn’t mean this is a gutless truck -- it's responsive to drive and easily keeps up with the traffic.

However not much happens below 1800rpm and the 2.8-litre engine doesn’t like to be revved much beyond 3200rpm  (redline is at 3800rpm) so everything’s happening in a typical old-school diesel narrow band.

Hampering the test vehicle was its low kays: we picked it up with about 1200km on the odo. Even during our 300km test you could feel it freeing up. The newness might also explain the notchy gearshift, which again felt as though it was freeing up and felt sweeter to shift as the kays clicked over.

LDV doesn't put many edicts on towing: it simply says that you should not tow at more than 100km/h. The LUXE-based Trailrider has a Gross Vehicle Mass of 2950kg and a Gross Combination Mass of 5950kg, so you can tow up to its 3000kg maximum towing capacity while still carrying a full (875kg) payload. However, towball download is restricted to 250kg.

How heavy can you go?

You can’t please everybody when tow testing. In an ideal world, we'd borrow a trailer with an Aggregate Trailer Mass that matched the tow vehicle, and then load it up to its ATM. That would mean rustling up 400-500kg of gear and squaring it away it inside the trailer.

Unfortunately, this is unrealistic for a one-day towing test. So to get a representative mass to lug along, we sometimes have to borrow a trailer that has an ATM that exceeds the vehicle’s maximum towing mass (but is tested empty, and therefore below the legal limit).

So the New Age Desert Rose loaned to us by New Age Sydney in Lansvale, NSW, is not going to be the caravan you buy to tow behind your shiny new LDV T60, because the van has an ATM of 3390kg. You simply won’t be able to load up the van to its maximum capacity while legally towing it with the LDV.

However, for our tow-testing purposes, the 2790kg Tare (220kg on the towball) New Age van was perfect, and still a comfortable 210kg below its allowed kilo maximum.

Hitching up

The LDV’s centre camera screen’s lack of clarity and abundance of reflections makes it harder to line up the towball to the hitch than it should be. The side mirrors show more of what’s happening behind a van than you’d think although towing mirrors are still necessary with a big van.

The back of the LDV dropped 30mm and the front rose 35mm with the caravan on the back. These figures are borderline for towing without a weight distribution hitch, and we elected to tow without a WDH to see how the T60 would perform.

On undulating, 80km/h backroads the LDV floated a little at the front but recovered fairly quickly. The rear suspension by contrast felt firm and a little jittery over the same roads. However, this was the worst of it and there are more mainstream utes that don’t ride as well as the LDV does.

As for towing stability, the LDV is good -- there was very little sway from the tall, heavy off-road van, and even then only when provoked.

Now to performance...  As suspected, the T60 struggled with the big van hooked up to it. Getting off the mark on an incline required clutch slip and a prayer and when cruising on the highway at 100km/h, even a slight incline saw speed plummet when in fifth gear. Regular shifts back to fourth -- and even third -- were necessary.

Hot on the hill

On the hill climb test, the LDV’s speed dropped from 90km/h at the start to 70km/h at the measuring point. The engine started to get hot, too.

Within its arc from the minimum nine o’clock position (cold) to maximum three o’clock (hot), temperature rose from the seven o’clock ‘normal’ position, to the five o’clock position during the climb. It returned to the normal range soon after.

The hillclimb test is not representative of how people normally tow; you don’t barrel up every hill holding a lower gear and throttle pinned, but then again the test section of hill is only about 400 metres long and ambient temperature was just 23 degrees.

What would happen on a longer hill climb on a hot day while towing as much weight -- even if as gently as  possible -- is the question.

Engine braking was quite good, with a speed of 73km/h measured going downhill, after starting the descent doing 70km/h in third gear.

Fuel consumption was measured at 10.2L/100km driving around the suburbs without a trailer and with the 2.8-tonne caravan the average was, unsurprisingly,  quite high at 17.1L/100km.

Summing up

The LDV’s engine does not have enough power or torque to make it a relaxed heavy-trailer tow vehicle. It simply has to work too hard and gets hot and thirsty doing it.

I reckon the story would be very different if you were towing no more than about 2300kg, so putting less stress on the engine but still getting to enjoy the the LDV’s towing stability and ride quality.

How much does the 2019 LDV T60 Trailrider cost?
Price: $38,937 (drive away)
Engine: 2.8-litre Four-cylinder turbo-diesel
Output: 110kW/360Nm
Transmission: Six-speed manual
Fuel: 8.8L/100km (ADR Combined)
CO2: 233g/km (ADR Combined)
Safety Rating: Five-star ANCAP