Tow hitch
hard attachment point on a road vehicle, used to tow a trailer
A tow hitch (or tow bar or trailer hitch in North America) is a device attached to the chassis of a vehicle for towing, or a towbar to an aircraft nose gear. It can take the form of a tow ball to allow swiveling and articulation of a trailer, or a tow pin, or a tow hook with a trailer loop, often used for large or agricultural vehicles where slack in the pivot pin allows similar movements. Another category is the towing pintle used on military vehicles worldwide.
To tow safely, the correct combination of vehicle and trailer must be combined with correct loading horizontally and vertically on the tow ball.
Regional variations
North America
Trailer hitches for conventional passenger cars, light-duty commercial vehicles, light trucks, and multipurpose passenger vehicles come in two main OEM or aftermarket types: receiver and bumper/fixed-drawbar.
Receiver-type hitches consist of a portion with a rearward-facing opening that accepts removable aftermarket hitch-mounted accessories: trailer hitch ball mounts, hitch bike racks, cargo carriers, etc.
Bumper/fixed-drawbar type hitches typically are built as one piece, have an integrated hole (sometimes more than one hole on pickup trucks) for the trailer ball mount, and are generally not compatible with aftermarket hitch-mounted accessories.
Outside North America, the vehicle mounting for the tow ball is called the tow bracket. The mounting points for all recent passenger vehicles are defined by the vehicle manufacturer and the tow-bracket manufacturer must use these mount points and prove the efficacy of their bracket for each vehicle by a full rig-based fatigue test.
Ball mounts
The trailer hitch ball attaches to a ball mount; with a diameter typically 1⁄16 inch (1.6 mm) larger than the ball bolt/shank diameter.
“Tow hitch” enters the record as hard attachment point on a road vehicle, used to tow a trailer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what hitch, hard and attachment can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q545837. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tow hitch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.