Advice on Regear? 295's Towing small camper 6.4mpg

I have a 2013 Tacoma Limited 4x4 which has a 6" rough country lift and 295/65r18 Duratracs with stock gears. I get bad 12 mpg on the new tires every day normal driving and decided to tow my new 21.5" travel trailer which is 3930lbs GVWR. I don't feel this is a huge size for a Tacoma. Driving there I got 8.5mpg and back I got 6.4mpg while going 65mph tops as I felt the rpms were higher than I wanted in flat North Texas. Barely broke 110 miles total distance before needing gas. That range and mpg is awful. Tiresize.com says I need 3.85 gears. Will this fix my problem? I definitely never expected stellar gas mileage and don't feel it is functional at all. I've even debated if I should sell and get an F-150 ecoboost but I don't want to go that route if I don't have to as I have things invested already in my Taco. Help -- thanks!

 

Regearing will help. 3.85s, if they make such a ratio, is way too tall. At that tire size I would expect something far lower, like 5.29 or 4.88.

You won't get all your mpg though.


(Edited to remove brain farts)

 

are your front tires larger than the rears ?!

 

Yeah for sure it won't get all the mileage and ok with that but the power seems off and it seems to struggle way more than I think it should. I figure re-gearing might help in both?

And the tire size is the same all the way around. Angle of picture plus the load of the trailer doesn't make it look good. 6" lift in front 4" lift in back (which levels) when not pulling something. That's a separate issue, I hate leveling lifts too. Trust me I already want to add some leafs to it as it looks dumb the second I go to Home Depot or throw anything in the back.. *Rant*

 

how many miles, maybe you need to pull the plugs and see how its running

 

It has 85k miles on it

 

First,I hope you're towing in 4th gear. Second,you need 4:56's.

 

I agree, maybe even 488.

 

Yeah I don't know why I threw out 5.29. I might have been tired. The best thing to do would be to sit down with a tire calculator and see what the different available ratios give you relative to stock size and gearing.

 

Is auto or manual trans?

 

It said 3.85 for new ratio

 

Automatic transmission

 

Yeah thats way too tall, something is wrong.

Stock ratio, on my truck with adorably small tires, is 4.30.

 

Then it came with 3.73 stock. Imo I’d go with 4.56s that should put at about 2500-2600 rpm in 5th if you go 4.88s closer to 2800 in 5th.

 

I think I found my issue on why the new ratio is way off -- I need to locate what the original ratio was to calculate LOL. My bad, let me check VIN.

 

My main issue -- will regearing in general fix my issues? Towing a small camper and restoring power/somewhat gas mpg??

 

Personally i would go 5.29s with towing and tire combo.

 

We had a similarly sized trailer and I towed it across the country with my then-stock tired/geared 2011 DCLB and averaged 10mpg the whole trip. I love my tacoma, but they just aren't ideal for a lot of towing of big stuff. We traded the wife's outback for an F150 with the 2.7L Ecoboost and it pulled the trailer like it wasn't even back there. It still got pretty crappy mileage and I would go with the 3.5 if I had it to do over again. My recommendation is a bigger truck or a smaller trailer.

 

Not completely. The ideal towing setup was probably the factory tires and wheels. But, you can at least get back in the range of sanity with regearing.

With my other truck, I've gotten 15-16 mpg pulling 4300 lbs of trailer before. Its all about being light on the skinny pedal and keeping it out of OD. And going slow.