There are some things you don’t realize when you’re buying a car. You might be looking at things like comfort, performance, predicted reliability and whether or not you can afford it. All of these are useful things, of course, but there are some hidden things that may not cross your mind.
For example, can you tow it? I can tow my car, it has a hook on the back and a place on the front bumper where you can screw in a hook. These are incredibly useful things if you get stuck, which I didn’t really appreciate until I was a passenger in a car that didn’t have those features. After hitting the ditch while a passenger in a friends’ car, we discovered that while the people of this province are incredibly helpful in trying to get the vehicle out of the ditch, the engineers of the company that made it – Chrysler, specifically, because it was a 1999 Chrysler Intrepid – were not quite so generous. We spent a great deal of time in the blustery weather just trying to find something to attach the tow rope onto, and it took someone with much more familiarity with the model in question to actually find a point you could attach to.
I don’t want to say Chrysler’s newer products are similarly cursed. In fact, I very much doubt it, because Chrysler is now part of Fiat, and Fiat is based in Europe. Why is that important? Well the European Union requires that all models have towing provisions on their vehicles. If you sell your car in Europe you will design those tow provisions right into the model, and there is no reason to take them off when shipping them to other markets. It’s cheaper to leave them in, plus people will appreciate them if they ever leave the road.
Canada should have a similar requirement. In fact, it should just have the exact same requirement, lift the text completely from the European Union regulations, shove it in our regulations, and pretty much every manufacturer would know what they’re designing for and how they should implement it, no major changes would have to take place. This is a country where pulling people out of snowbanks is something that happens regularly – lots of snow and a spread out population conspire to make journeys to our country’s ditches a regular occurrence.
However, Transport Canada does not appear to have a regulation regarding mandatory tow points on cars. They certainly support modern safety features, some of which are great for avoiding going into that ditch in the first place, but when it comes to just putting a way to tow a car into practice, they have no rules. That is a mistake in any country that has to deal with treacherous weather, and it’s a mistake in general. Sometimes you have to tow a car because something has broken, or even just need to get it quickly off the road so it’s not a danger. Towing is just something that has to be done sometimes, and it’s ridiculous to have a car where this is not a possibility built into the model.
We should be able to have the ability to easily and quickly extricate our vehicles from snowbanks in inclement weather. It’s not a big expense, it’s already designed into most cars you can buy and it’s something that residents of this country would be able to benefit from. That it isn’t required does not make sense on Canadian roads.
