How much does an AeroVault trailer cost?

This is the whole page. Two trailers sit in front of you, one costs a great deal more, and that difference is real money on a day you can name. The case for the expensive one is that it hands a slice of the difference back on every towed mile, and those miles are spread across years you have not lived yet, so the two halves of the decision are never visible at the same moment. Putting them on one page is the entire contribution here. At our defaults the fuel line does real work: 40,000 towed miles at 13 mpg against 10 mpg is $12,308 of fuel against $16,000, a saving of $3,692. That is a large number and it is the aerodynamic case, stated in dollars instead of adjectives. It is also smaller than the $9,000 of extra value the expensive trailer consumes over the same decade, so at our placeholder figures the AeroVault lands $5,308 behind across ten years, which is $531 a year. Both of those results are honest and neither is a verdict on the trailer, because every figure that produced them is a placeholder we invented so the page had something to draw. Put your own in.

The saving is earned per mile, so the mileage box is the one that decides whether a premium repays itself, and it is the box most likely to be filled in with an aspiration. The pattern is consistent and worth naming plainly: people buy against the season they are imagining rather than the season they had. A trailer bought for twelve events a year and used for four has not become a worse trailer, but the arithmetic that justified it has quietly lost two thirds of its input, and nothing on the driveway tells you that happened. So count the miles with the trailer actually behind you, use last year if you have a last year, and if you do not, enter the figure you would be embarrassed to have overstated. Then run the page again at the optimistic number. The distance between those two answers is the real uncertainty in this purchase, and it is usually larger than the gap the page prints, which is the most useful thing this calculator can tell you.

Towing economy is a product of the tow vehicle, the terrain, the crosswind and above all the speed, and the drag penalty climbs steeply with speed, so the same trailer behind the same truck returns materially different figures at 60 and at 75. A number quoted by somebody with a different vehicle on different roads at a different speed is not transferable to you however honestly they reported it, and a number we printed would be read as a measurement and would silently settle a decision worth tens of thousands of dollars. So we refuse to print one. What matters for this page is the gap between the two figures rather than either alone: two readers who tow at different speeds can disagree about both numbers and still get the same answer, provided each measured both trailers consistently. And this is measurable rather than arguable, which sets it apart from almost everything else people argue about here. Fill up, tow a hundred miles of your own roads at your own speed, fill up again. One afternoon beats every opinion you will read.

A dollar spent in year nine counts the same as a dollar spent today, which quietly flatters the column whose spending comes later. That is the fuel, and the fuel is the expensive trailer's argument, so this simplification leans gently toward the AeroVault rather than away from it. Worth knowing when the gap the page prints is narrow. No interest is in either column either, and that leans the other way: the loan would be larger on the expensive side, so a reader who would borrow for the trailer is looking at a comparison that understates the premium. If you would finance either purchase, price the loan separately and add it to that side by hand, because the rate and the term at these sums can move the answer further than the fuel does. The trailer insurance is absent from both columns too, and it is one of the few carrying costs that genuinely tracks the value of the thing insured, which again runs against the expensive trailer.

A light trailer can mean the vehicle already on your driveway is enough, and a heavier one can mean it is not, and when that is true the cost of the vehicle that could pull the heavier trailer belongs in the comparison even though it is not a trailer cost. It is also not the situation most buyers are in, and defaulting it to anything above zero would have asserted a truck purchase into a driveway we cannot see. So you decide whether it applies. Do it against the door jamb rather than the brochure: find your vehicle's towing rating and its payload rating, and check the loaded weight of each trailer against both, where loaded means the trailer plus the car plus the tools and fuel and spares that go in with it, which is a great deal more than any empty weight quoted at you. If both trailers clear comfortably, leave this at zero. If the heavier one does not clear, enter the extra over what you would otherwise have spent rather than the whole price of a truck, since you would have owned some vehicle either way.

The trailer itself is a factory quote against a model and a configuration, so this page leaves that figure to the factory rather than inventing one to stand in for it. What this page adds is the figure a quote cannot give you, which is what the trailer costs you once the towing is counted. That matters more here than on an ordinary trailer, because the case for this one is a case about how it pulls, and how something pulls is fuel burned per mile rather than a feature on a list. Put in what each trailer lands at, what you think each is worth when you are done, the miles you tow a year, the fuel economy you get behind each, and what fuel costs you. At our placeholder figures the fuel saving comes to $3,692 across 40,000 towed miles and the expensive trailer still lands $5,308 behind across ten years, because it consumed $9,000 more in value than the alternative did. Change the mileage and that result moves further than any price on the page moves it.

That depends on two numbers you have not entered yet, which is why the page asks for them rather than answering. The first is the gap in fuel economy between the two trailers behind your vehicle at your speed, and the second is how many miles you tow. Neither is a property of the trailer alone. Towing economy is decided by the tow vehicle, the terrain, the crosswind and above all the speed, with the drag penalty climbing steeply as speed rises, which is why the same trailer behind the same truck returns different figures on different trips and why quoted numbers travel poorly between owners. The useful thing is that the saving compounds per mile while the premium is paid once, so the whole question is whether you have enough miles to finish the job. A high-mileage tower can repay a large premium from fuel alone. Somebody towing to four events a year cannot, and no amount of arguing about drag changes that, which is the finding this page exists to make visible before the money moves.

Because a purchase price is not a cost, and two separate mechanisms can close the gap between these trailers. The first is the one everybody discusses: fuel, earned back per towed mile, which grows without limit as the mileage grows. The second gets discussed far less and is often larger. What a trailer costs you is what you paid less what comes back when you sell it, so a trailer that holds a high share of its price consumed very little of what you handed over, while a cheaper one that holds a low share consumed most of it. Those two mechanisms are independent, and stacked together across a long holding period with real mileage they can close a wide sticker gap and then reverse it. Add the tow vehicle line, in the specific case where the heavier trailer needs more vehicle than you own and the lighter one does not, and the reversal can be decisive. Shorten the holding period or cut the towed miles and all three weaken at once.

Several real things, and they do not all lean the same way. Nothing is discounted for time, so a dollar of fuel spent in year nine counts as a dollar spent today, which flatters the fuel side and therefore the expensive trailer. No finance charge is in either column, and the loan would be larger on the expensive side, so that leans the other way. Insurance is absent from both, and it tends to track the value of the thing insured, which again runs against the premium trailer. Storage, maintenance, tyres and registration renewals are out of both columns because they run on the calendar rather than on which trailer you chose. Neither column contains a replacement: both assume one trailer bought at the start and sold at the end, so if you think one of these would need replacing inside your holding period, that is a different comparison and the Oliver calculator on this site is built for it. And the tow vehicle appears only if you put it there, which you should do only after checking the loaded weight of each trailer against your own vehicle's towing and payload ratings on the door jamb.