Hi NoSmoke, we played with this for a while and spoke to ICBC (provincial insurance) agents to see what we were up against.
It would seem that there is no rating for towing with the Beetle! The manual says "Not available at time of printing". We looked everywhere and contacted VW locally to see if we could get a tow rating. There was nothing concrete.
We did some math and looked at GVW's of the car and trailer. The trailer comes in just over 50% of the cars weight with an Axle weight of 1,620 lbs. and GVW of 2,200 lbs. (We aren't there yet).
We then looked at the practicality of the TDI as a tow vehicle. This part made sense. We have a car that has ample power and ample brakes to stop. Then we also wanted to make sure that the trailer had brakes too to take the guess work out of the picture.
Since there was no tow values available and we looked at the UK to see that the Golf TDI was tow vehicle of the year a few years back. That helped us decide that this would work well. Maybe the UK Golf's are better!
VW appears to be afraid to publish anything. However, your 2008 Toyota Corolla has a 1,500 lbs rating! Oh ya, so does your 2010 Honda Civic.
I wouldn't try to do this if I hadn't changed the brakes, upped the power and had a custom hitch made along with a rock solid suspension. The car in its stock form would have been a non starter. As it sits right now, we can pull this trailer anywhere and hardly feel it on the back of the Beetle.
The trailer hitch industry has also helped reduce the tow values by limiting the hitches available to North America. Have a look at the Bosal and Westfalia import hitches. We just get those little 1 1/4" receiver units that screw into the spare tire well.
I am not too sure about getting pulled over for this as we certainly have had the opportunity to get pulled over in our past trips. In the last 4 trips we have come across a lot of cops and nothing.
I will discuss this with our insurance agent to see if we can add a tow value to our policy. Just to close that possible loop. Thanks for bringing this back to the forefront.
I think this setup would attract some attention:
We used to pull an 1200 lbs tent trailer with our VR6 GTI and the big difference was no trailer brakes. We used one of those little screw on hitches which I always felt uneasy about. The car handled the load very well.
