About 10 years ago, a friend of mine needed to slide a shed away from a lake’s increasing waterline. I tried to use my 4×4 Jeep Wrangler, but it couldn’t do the job. An hour later another friend showed up with a Ford Excursion and pulled it without a problem. All of my friends are engineers and said. “Well, it’s because we needed a longer wheelbase”. Why does that matter? Isn’t it about mass?
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A longer wheelbase will make the car or truck more stable on the highway, but it has nothing to do with how hard it can pull.
In first gear you’re either limited by engine power or tire grip. Tire grip depends on the surface that the vehicle is on, the tires themselves and the mass of the vehicle.
As a rule of thumb, on dry tarmac and with regular road tires, the maximum pulling force a vehicle can generate is roughly equivalent to the weight of the vehicle (assuming it has 4-wheel drive). So a 4000 lb Wrangler would be able to apply 4000 lb of force to the shed, and a 7000 lb Excursion would be able to apply about 7000 lb of force before the tires lose traction and start spinning.
On soft ground those values will be lower overall, but the Excursion would still be able to pull almost twice as much as the Wrangler.
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