U-Haul’s New Flatbed Trailer Is An Absolute Beast At Towing Cars And Almost Anything Else, With One Small Catch

Chances are, if you need to move a car from one place to another and you cannot drive it for some reason, your first stop might be your local U-Haul shop. For decades, U-Haul has offered its simple, robust Auto Transport trailer to haul everything from your 1991 Honda Civic to your pickup truck. But the Auto Transport has many limitations, chief among them the requirement to park the vehicle at the very front of the trailer, and the giant hole in the middle of the deck. U-Haul has rectified the many quirks of the Auto Transport with the new Toy Hauler. I got to test this new trailer out, and I think it’s the holy grail of rental car haulers. There is one big caveat, however.

Griffin, Jason, Otto, and I descended into Alameda, near San Francisco, to attend Radwood this past weekend. Along for the ride was our Autozam AZ-1, which, as you might remember, has a Liberty Walk body kit that makes it look like a Ferrari F40, and a wrap that makes it look like a Mazda 787B racer. The Mazda 787bb, as we call it, is a car playing a car disguised as another car, and it’s such a delight.

It’s also a massive pain in the backside. The body kit makes the front bumper comically long, and I kid you not, it also deletes the car’s fuel filler door. Add in the really low suspension, and attempting to drive the Autozam any real distance is not easily possible. You’ll scrape the car on every wayward penny on the Interstate, and have to disassemble some of the rear end just to put gas in it. Understandably, despite my begging to drive the car from Los Angeles to Alameda, the guys had other plans. We reached out to our friends at U-Haul, who hooked us up with a free rental of the new Toy Hauler trailer.

As The Autopian‘s resident U-Haul addict, I saw this as an opportunity to really test out the latest and greatest from America’s favorite move-it-yourself rental company.

Car Enthusiasts Wanted More From U-Haul

The U-Haul Toy Hauler, or TH, if you care about U-Haul’s codes, was announced in late 2024. According to Jeff Korman, the director of the U-Haul Technical Center, the Toy Hauler was developed in response to customer suggestions. Namely, U-Haul customers said that the existing Auto Transport didn’t work to haul racecars, off-road SUVs, side-by-sides, or three-wheel vehicles.

These people aren’t wrong. I’ve rented U-Haul Auto Transport trailers more times than I can count, and they’ve sometimes bothered me for one reason or another.

The biggest “dummy-proof” feature of the Auto Transport, the built-in vehicle wheel straps, requires you to drive your vehicle to the very front of the trailer. If your car has a low bumper, it will get crunched up by the front lip of the trailer. If your vehicle has very long overhangs, like a pickup truck or classic land yacht, you will have to get under the car to secure the straps. If your car is narrow with equally skinny tires, the straps might not fit as snugly as you’d like.

The requirement to park the vehicle at the very front may also mess with weight distribution. Ideally, a safely loaded trailer has about a 60 percent front, 40 percent rear weight distribution with up to around 15 percent of the trailer’s total weight on the tongue. Depending on the vehicle being transported, this might mean parking the car on the trailer in reverse, or maybe parking the vehicle closer to the axles of the trailer. The U-Haul Auto Transport doesn’t permit parking the vehicle further back, leaving open the potential for way too much weight to be up front.

Then there’s the hole.

The Auto Transport doesn’t have a traditional deck. Instead, it’s essentially two ramps that run the length of the trailer. This is fine for when you’re loading a typical car, but a royal pain for anything even remotely weird.

Japanese Kei cars and Smarts, for example, are so narrow that you have a margin of literally just a couple of inches on both sides. Get it wrong, and your car falls off the ramps or falls through the hole in the middle.

Finally, the length and the width of the Auto Transport make loading larger vehicles, like 4x4s and vans, rather difficult, if not impossible. Combine the hole with the big front lip, and the Auto Transport is a headache for racecars, many ATVs, all three-wheelers, or any other toy that you might want to load onto a true flatbed trailer.

Meet The Toy Hauler

U-Haul has an in-house engineering team that dedicated themselves to the mission. Unlike some rental companies, U-Haul doesn’t just rent out commercially-built trailers. Instead, its engineers design their own trailers, and U-Haul has facilities to build them. Having its own in-house engineering allows U-Haul to build trailers that last for decades while also being relatively foolproof for the people who don’t know how to tow trailers. This engineering is part of why the U-Haul CT13 remains one of America’s most desirable fiberglass campers even though the last one was built over four decades ago.

The Toy Hauler, which entered U-Haul’s rental fleet in spring 2025, is designed to right all of the wrongs of the Auto Transport.

Like U-Haul’s other towing equipment, the Toy Hauler is, at its core, a massive lump of heavy-gauge galvanized steel. According to U-Haul, each Toy Hauler starts life in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, where fabricators build a steel platform. Then, a truck delivers these platforms to a production facility in Novi, Michigan, where workers spend ten hours a day, four days a week assembling trailers. About 16 people are capable of assembling a Toy Hauler every hour in the facility. Toy Haulers are also built in Arizona and California, and are generally shipped to nearby rental regions.

This build material makes U-Haul trailers really heavy for what they are, but it also means that these trailers can take a serious beating for many years and still be safe for many more years. Remember, U-Haul knows that people who have no idea what they’re doing will tow these trailers. Those people will bump these trailers into things, overload them, and generally treat them like crap. So they have to be built to survive. The Toy Hauler is no exception. U-Haul says these trailers are built to withstand around 20,000 miles a year for at least 25 years.

These trailers are physically huge, too. The length of the deck of the Toy Hauler is 16 feet, 1-1/4 inches, up from the 12 feet, 3 inches of the Auto Transport. Width is up, too, with the Toy Hauler spanning 8 feet, 2-1/2 inches compared to the 6 feet, 7 inches of the Auto Transport. This, U-Haul says, officially makes the Toy Hauler capable of carrying pickup trucks. In the past, a truck being hauled by an Auto Transport might have its rear tires an inch from the edge, if that.

This extra girth translates to the scales, too, as an empty Toy Hauler weighs a hefty 3,155 pounds compared to the 2,210-pound empty weight of the Auto Transport. The good news is that the Toy Hauler can carry more weight. The Auto Transport is limited to 5,290 pounds of cargo, while the Toy Hauler kicks haulage up to 6,845 pounds.

Another, smaller upgrade is ramp length, which has been increased to 8 feet in the Toy Hauler over the 6 foot, 6-inch ramps of the Auto Transport. The distance between each ramp is unchanged at 3 feet, 7 inches. This does mean that, if you’re depending entirely on the U-Haul-provided ramps, your car cannot be any narrower than a car that can already fit on an Auto Transport. However, if you use your own ramps, your car can be however narrow you want it to be.

Another upgrade is tie-down points. While there are specific tie-down points on the Toy Hauler, there are also lots of different hard points that you can use to lash a vehicle down anywhere on the trailer.

Sitting under the trailer is a leaf spring suspension and solid axles from Lippert, which you may know better for its RV parts. The axles reach U-Haul pre-assembled with hubs, bearings, and drum brakes. The trailer itself uses a Demco surge braking system like a boat trailer and the rest of U-Haul’s larger trailers.

Here’s how it works, from my coverage of surge brakes for RVs:

A surge brake system is self-contained, requires no modification to the tow vehicle, and requires no fine-tuning from a brake controller. In the tongue of a trailer with surge brakes, you’ll find a master cylinder. When you apply your tow vehicle’s brakes, the tongue of the trailer pushes a rod into the master cylinder, activating the brakes. The brakes work by using our old friend, physics!

For U-Haul, the benefit of a surge brake system is that the tow vehicle is not required to have a trailer braking controller. The trailer can stop itself.

So, on paper, the Toy Hauler rights all of the wrongs of the Auto Transport. It even has drive-over fenders! How does it work in practice?

Loading Up

Having the Autozam as a test subject was fascinating. As I noted earlier, the Autozam’s ride height is terribly low, and the front bumper hilariously long. Honestly, you can’t even fit a shoe in the gap between the front bumper and the ground. This is about the worst vehicle to attempt to load onto a trailer this side of a Lotus Elise. It wouldn’t even be able to get onto a lowboy trailer without scraping something. The Toy Hauler has a 19-inch deck height, and that assumes the trailer is level when hooked up to your tow vehicle.

Thankfully, I have a ton of experience loading Kei cars and Smart Fortwos onto U-Haul Auto Transport trailers, so I know all the tricks to get them on without harming the car. When I load a low-riding Kei car, I reduce the ramp angle by dropping the trailer’s jack to the ground and cranking it down. This has the effect of getting the rear of the deck a little lower.

I did that here, but it wasn’t enough. In order to get the Autozam to fit, I first examined the parking lot. I noticed that the parking lot was a sort of “V” shape, with the center of the “V” serving as water drainage. I parked our Mazda CX-90 long-term tester with the deck of the trailer just over the center of the V, slightly spilling over to the other side. When we deployed the ramps, this meant that there was slightly less of an angle to them. But that wasn’t enough.

We then had to use a set of race ramps to further reduce the angle of the ramps, and then a set of strategically placed wood blocks to reduce ramp angle even more. This, of course, was not U-Haul’s fault. A car so astoundingly low to the ground is going to be hard to load onto any trailer.

Thankfully, all of these measures combined meant that the Autozam scooted onto the trailer without scraping. From there, it was super easy, barely an inconvenience to position the car on the trailer and then to secure it. The Toy Hauler does not have built-in straps, but does have two safety chains. We ended up using the two chains plus four straps.

In my experience, the built-in straps of the Auto Transport sometimes work themselves loose over a journey. So, I prefer this setup here where you have four points of securement plus two backups. You’re also not required to use the wheels to secure the car. In our case, the Autozam had two proper hook attachments in the rear, and more hard points in the front.

On The Road

On the road, the almost extra 1,000 pounds of the trailer were always felt. The trailer, plus the Autozam, added up to about 4,760 pounds, which was just 240 pounds short of the Mazda’s towing capacity. Ideally, you should never use up more than 80 percent of any metric of your vehicle’s towing capacity. You can max out your vehicle and it will tow the trailer, but you will have less of a cushion for long hills, excessively hot days, emergency braking events, and other less than ideal situations. By my calculations, we were using up 95 percent of the Mazda’s capacity.

Anyway, the Toy Hauler made me feel like I was dragging a ship’s anchor behind the Mazda. In most ways, this was great, as the trailer always tracked straight, never swayed, and always felt planted. The trailer was entirely unbothered by massive potholes or by swerving to avoid distracted drivers. I’ve always felt like the Auto Transport was a stable trailer. This one is even better. There was never a time when I felt like I wasn’t in control, or that the trailer was trying to swap ends with the Mazda.

If anything, it was amazingly easy to forget it was there. I even liked how the trailer was much quieter going down the road than most Auto Transports I’ve towed. Though that could be because the trailer was still very new.

The only time the whole “boat anchor” part was bad was when Jason was towing the trailer up the Grapevine. This highway is infamous for its relentless six percent grade that sees you climb about 1,600 feet over six miles. This can be challenging even for cars that aren’t towing anything, and we even saw cars broken down on the shoulder. In our case, Jason tried to pass a car on the grade, and the Mazda responded by overheating and going into a low-power mode.

In fairness to the Toy Hauler, this could have also happened with the lighter Auto Transport, too. Either way, we got the Mazda to cool down by getting off the throttle and just maintaining the speed limit. The issue never happened again on the way to Alameda.

There were more great parts to the Toy Hauler, too. Despite being larger and heavier, the trailer remained just as easy to maneuver and back up as an Auto Transport. We also liked how there weren’t huge sides to the trailer, which is great for displaying a car. U-Haul says the low bedsides make the trailer great for hauling things that aren’t cars, like hay bales or other cargo that you’d want to slide onto a flatbed.

Sadly, my fairy tale came to an end when it came time to get the Autozam off the Toy Hauler. Despite repeating all the same steps as before, the car scraped its side skirts on the rear lip of the deck. It then happened again when we loaded the Autozam back onto the trailer after Radwood.

The Best U-Haul Car Hauler, But Maybe Not The Best Trailer

So, as much as I want to call the Toy Hauler the holy grail of rental car trailers, I have to stop short.

I must give the caveat that, if you’re loading an astoundingly, ridiculously low car, you’ll either want to provide your own really long ramps, some wood blocks, a loading dock, or rent a low-profile trailer that’s specifically meant for low cars. Really, the same insane build quality that makes the Toy Hauler a tank also makes it rather tall on top of being heavy.

But that caveat aside, I think the Toy Hauler is a large improvement all around. I like everything from the longer ramps and the third ramp to the totally solid deck and the many places to tie stuff down. I’ve seen posts online showing Toy Haulers loaded down with boats, motorcycles, trikes, tractors, furniture, railway speeder cars, and sidecar motorcycles. I’ve only seen one Toy Hauler in person, and that one had a Sea-Doo on a trailer strapped down next to two motorcycles. Clearly, the renter wanted to figure out how to tow the Sea-Doo and motorcycles at the same time with only one truck, and the Toy Hauler permitted such shenanigans.

Perhaps this is why U-Haul itself now advertises the Toy Hauler as a “Flatbed Utility Trailer,” because it can haul so much more than vehicles. The Toy Hauler also isn’t that much more expensive. Currently, Auto Transports go for $69.95 a day where I live. The Toy Hauler is just $20 more per day.

I think the extra utility is worth it, provided you actually need the extra utility. If whatever you’re towing will fit just fine on an Auto Transport, rent one of those and save the money. But if you have that truck, that 4×4, or that weird car? Give the Toy Hauler a try. You might fall in love as I did. Just make sure that car has more than an inch of ground clearance.

Top photo: Author