Wow, £600 that seems a bit steep even with fully wired VSK, I would have thought around £450 tops.
Fitter pays around £100 for the tow bar and £100 for a fully wired VSK, add in £50 for the coding if required, so build cost is around £250 max, the rest is time/labour.
Quote: Originally posted by Francais on 12/9/2020
Wow, £600 that seems a bit steep even with fully wired VSK, I would have thought around £450 tops.
Fitter pays around £100 for the tow bar and £100 for a fully wired VSK, add in £50 for the coding if required, so build cost is around £250 max, the rest is time/labour.
I've been looking at mobile fitters which maybe is more expensive? Got a couple of personal reccomended ones I've not chased up yet though.
From what I've seen on forums the price seems to vary wildly.
On my old 2002 MINI Cooper with no reversing sensor or camera, I had a flange type tow bar retro-fitted in 2012 for towing a leisure trailer.
For the 2017 MINI Countryman (no longer with me), I had a swan neck removable tow bar fitted by the MINI dealership before I collected the car, again for towing the leisure trailer. It did not interfere with the rear parking sensor. In fact, it recognised if the tow bar was fitted or not and made allowance for it.
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My Volvo V70 was the only car I've had with reversing sensors and I had a flange tow-bar fitted to that. No problem whatsoever with the sensors picking up the tow-ball. The further back away from the rear bumper the tow-ball is would make it more likely to be picked up by the sensors I would think. From what I have seen most swan-neck tow-bars seem to stick out further, so I would have thought that would make them more likely to be picked up.
My current car, a 2008 Nissan X Trail, has a camera rather than sensors, so again no problem. The X Trail and the previous Hyundai Tucson both already had tow-bars fitted when I bought them.