Ford Is Trying To Make Lining Up A Truck’s Tow Ball With A Trailer As Easy As Pushing A Button

One of the difficulties faced by owners of travel trailers is just hooking up the darn thing. Trailer hitching is a wonderful ballet of aligning a tow vehicle with a trailer’s tongue and when you do it wrong, it can result in a scene amusing for everyone but the driver. Ford thinks it has the solution with its new Ford Pro Trailer Hitch Assist. Instead of trying to do the song and dance of trailer hitching, just push a button and your truck will do the whole process for you.

Camping season is finally here and as a result, my parents are already lighting up my phone with requests to help them tow their travel trailer. Usually, I come over to their place, hop into their tow vehicle, then hitch the trailer up all on my own. It’s something that I’ve been doing for my parents for several years and I enjoy it. Our tow vehicles are old enough that they don’t even have backup cameras, let alone fancy hitching tech.

My strategy for hitching up a trailer involves looking at the rear window of the tow vehicle and centering the trailer in it as I approach. That usually gets me within a couple of inches of the coupler. Once I get the distance down to the final foot or so, I then leave my door open, pick a spot on the ground, and move inches relative to that spot on the ground. Once I’m under the trailer’s coupler, I can solve small discrepancies in alignment by turning the tow vehicle’s wheels, which often moves the ball just enough so that the trailer can slide on. My process works really well and quickly, sometimes even quicker than having a spotter.

However, not everyone can hitch a trailer up with that level of ease and finesse. Watching my father trying to hitch a trailer up on his own is great fun. He’ll miss the tongue by feet or slam the hitch ball into the tongue. In decades past, he was an experienced over-the-road trucker. My father taught me most of what I know about towing, but hitching up the wagon remains a challenge. The picture above shows his hitching job after he forgot to properly align the anchors for the weight distribution hitch system.

Autonomous Trailer Hitching

Back in August, Ford announced that the F-150 Lightning was getting something called Pro Trailer Hitch Assist, a system that automatically controls steering, braking, and throttle to make trailer coupling easier. Recently, the company published an explainer on how the system actually works with F-Series trucks.

Ford says that you first have to get your F-Series to within 20 feet of your camper. When you activate Pro Trailer Hitch Assist, the truck will use machine learning and computer vision to detect where your trailer’s coupler is in relation to your hitch ball. Basically, the system uses a camera, radars, and algorithms to make this determination.

Once Pro Trailer Hitch Assist knows where everything is, you tell the system that your trailer’s coupler is vertically higher than the ball. Then, push and hold the button and the system will get to work. Ford says that the systems control algorithms will maneuver the truck into position directly under the tongue. It handles everything including steering, braking, and throttle. You don’t have to align the truck; all you do is sit there, hold the button, and monitor the progress from the big screen.

When the job is done, your truck will stop under the coupler and the system will give you the message “Alignment complete. Connect the trailer.” From there, you just hop out and lower the trailer onto your hitch ball. No spotters and hopefully no silly mistakes that’ll end up on YouTube. Apparently, the truck’s system is trained to identify a variety of trailer types and it can work in different weather and terrain conditions. The system also utilizes ultrasonic sensors to help ensure you don’t run someone or something down when reversing.

Ford’s Towing And Hauling Tech

Ford has been working on technology for people who struggle with the business of loading down their trucks with gear and trailers.

In 2021, David Tracy wrote a dive on how the F-150 uses its taillights and infotainment display to tell you how much of your payload you’re eating up. Ford’s Onboard Scales and Smart Hitch software can be helpful in determining if you’re within the limits of your truck and if you have your trailer within the ballpark of properly-loaded. From David:

With Onboard Scales, you want the taillights to remain below four bars (the lights will blink once you hit the payload limit) while with the Smart Hitch feature, you want the center two bars to be lit (the lower bar will blink if the tongue weight is too low, the upper if it’s too high — see below).

On the infotainment screen, the Onboard Scales function will give you a horizontal line that rises and falls relative to a red and green bar as you throw weight (or passengers) into the vehicle. The green represents load conditions within payload limits, and is broken into four quartiles that each correspond to an LED in each taillamp. When the horizontal bar reaches the red zone, the vehicle is overloaded.

Another display mode in the Onboard Scales software, shown below, helps drivers understand how much weight they’ve added to their truck. Rather than having a bar that adjusts relative to the max payload limit, this view allows the driver to set the scale to zero to understand rough weights of additional cargo.

Note that I say “rough,” as the system is only accurate to within 200 pounds.

[…]

As for the Smart Hitch function, that shows a horizontal bar relative to a green bar that floats between two small red bars (see below). The bottom red bar represents a condition where the tongue weight is too low (below 10 percent of trailer weight, which the user inputs into the system manually), and the top bar representing a tongue weight that’s too high (above 15 percent of trailer weight).

Even though the accuracy is rough, that’s still better than nothing and it’s some pretty smart stuff. It helps take some of the guesswork out of loading. As David notes, too much tongue weight can cause the truck to oversteer. Too little tongue weight (or worse, a trailer loaded largely in the rear) and you can get the tail wagging the dog, so to speak. This can turn what should be a fun family road trip with the camper into a disaster.

In the past, Ford has offered up other gizmos to help you with trailers. Ford’s Pro Trailer Backup Assist targeted the difficulties some have with backing up a trailer. As you may know, when you reverse with a trailer, your inputs with the steering wheel result in an opposite action. Crank that wheel to the right, the trailer begins going left. Crank it left and it’ll go right. Keeping the trailer straight in reverse requires what’s essentially a combination of that. Well, Pro Trailer Backup Assist gives you a knob. Turn the knob in the direction that you want the consist to go and it’ll go there.

The competition has its own tech. Some General Motors trucks allow Super Cruise functionality when towing and some GM trucks have a feature that essentially ghosts your trailer so you can see through it. Ram has its own Trailer Reverse Steering Control and all of these automakers have cameras of some sort for towing.

A Great Idea For Campers

Back to the new system, Ford’s Pro Trailer Hitch Assist was initially available for the Lightning, but the automaker says that it’s now available for 2023 F-150, F-150 Lightning, and the latest Super Duty trucks. 2021 and 2022 model year trucks will eventually get the software through an over-the-air update.

Ford says that its Ford’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems team earned 60 patents in designing this system and it should get smarter over time as trucks with the feature will upload trailer data to Ford. The feature is available for F-150s with the Trailer Tow Package ($1,325 depending on trim) and Super Duty trucks with the Tow Technology Package ($925 depending on trim).

Of course, we all know that computers aren’t always perfect at their jobs, so you’ll definitely want to monitor the truck’s progress and be ready to pump the brakes if things go wrong. But, at least in theory, I can see this being huge for a lot of campers out there. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve watched struggle with hooking up a camper and sometimes the failures came with expensive consequences. I can also see it being a big deal for the solo campers out there who don’t have a helper.

This is something that I’d love to test. I don’t see myself giving up my trailer-hitching strategy, but it would be really cool to see this technology at work.

(Images to Ford unless otherwise noted.)

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