An explanation of overheating transmission and towing guild lines. How to tow a car behind your RV or RV with Tito DIY 224,513 views. 13:33. Manual Transmission vs Auto CVT Performance I've always heard it's bad for a transmission to tow a load while using overdrive in an automatic or 5th gear in a manual (if it's a 5-speed). My truck is a 5-speed manual and I'll be towing a small boat next week to a lake that's about 4 hours away. The boat is a 15ft aluminum and only weighs a few hundred pounds. Towing a boat can be difficult on your transmission, especially in hilly areas. Automatic transmissions are designed to take terrain into account and adjust the way the engine works in order to get the most efficient movement out of the car or truck. While there are plenty of people who say that you need a manual to have the control necessary to tow a boat properly, advances in automatic tow, one car worked and the other didn't. Your answer was that one car had been parked in First gear, and the other had been parked in Reverse. The car in Reverse worked. As a result of that puzzler, I made my husband start putting our '86 Nissan pickup in Reverse when he parked. In '96, we bought a Ford Contour SE with a manual transmission. Would it harm a car engine to tow the car forward while the manual transmission was in reverse gear? I know the answer, but unless you want to deliberately embarrass one of your readers, you won't You are currently viewing the FIAT Forum as a guest which gives you limited access to our many features. car stuck in 1st gear; cannot move or tow. All Automatic transmission cars won't start unless in Park or Neutral, so hardly a design flaw or limited to the dualogic Perhaps whoever towed the jeep put the cars transmission in neutral rather than its transfer case, which if you didn't know comes behind the transmission, which is why it saves the transmission from wear. I'm no towing expert however, but if im wrong somone correct me and I'll