Please check your towing equipment.

I wanted to let Reese have a chance to make this right before I posted it online, but they wouldn't replace the part, and, more importantly, didn't seem all that concerned about the breakage. This is appallingly poor craftsmanship on an extremely important part. This happened towing a 10,000 lb trailer between Houston and Dallas. Fortunately the gusset held. See more here. Link

Looks pretty rusted.

Whoa! Glad everything's okay! Sucks that Reese doesn't give a crap, you'd think this is something that would at least elicit concern...

That's not much of a weld. There is a surprising lack of material there.

Why is it that companies refuse to weld properly? That damn thing should have been beveled, and multiple passes (or a big single pass by a badass machine) should've been laid in there. I wanted to get some drop spindles for my car, but the company that made them quit, because they didn't want to properly weld a piece of 1" thick steel to another one, so they just ditched the project.

Probably because of the typical "they want HOW much? There's only, like, $5 worth of steel in that thing".

Keith Tanner wrote: Probably because of the typical "they want HOW much? There's only, like, $5 worth of steel in that thing".

This right here! /\/\/\

No rust. I'm in Dallas. There's NO penetration on the welds.

Sad to say, the only thing these corporations respond to is legal action.
Remember 'Fight Club', they do the math, and if it costs less to pay off the wrongful death lawsuits than to fix the problem so no one dies, then folks will die.
Corporations ARE NOT PEOPLE.
They have no morals, no feelings, no emotions, no regrets, serving only their own (non-human) interests.
Like robots, corporations are 'fictitious entities', they are created by people, but ARE NOT PEOPLE.
For the religious amongst you, see 'False Idols', 'Graven Images', etc.

I had to deal with them on a bike rack I'd bought. Designed to hold four bikes and to fit in a 2" receiver. Out of the box, step one in the setup guide is to insert the hitch into the receiver. It doesn't fit. It seems the square tubing isn't, well, square.

I found it at a nice price, so rather than return it, I go to Reese support. After about two weeks of calling, I get someone on the phone who thinks the rack goes over the receiver hitch. Quite sure of themselves too.

I broke out the angle grinder and krylon. It fits.

I'm not overly impressed with Reese either.

Keith Tanner wrote: Probably because of the typical "they want HOW much? There's only, like, $5 worth of steel in that thing".

$5 worth of steel, $20 worth of fabrication, $2,000,000 worth of liability...

I got yelled at on another forum for wasting my money spending $160 for a Curt hitch for the RX-7 when I could have thrown together something for $20 in materials. Yeah, no, when it comes to something as important as connecting a potential oh-E36 M3 device to a car, I'm gonna go ahead and buy someone else's product. I'm not wasting money, I'm buying insurance - the engineering liability is on someone else.

I thought the corporation would be smart enough to shower me with free parts to keep me happy and quiet. I figured if they stood behind their product and took care of it, I'd chalk it up to a freak defect. I'm actually glad they didn't because it's better to show this to people. They're a major name in the industry churning out dangerous parts. If this would have finished failing people could have died. 10 minutes before this was discovered it was traveling at 75 mph. I'd hate to see what a 10,000 lb trailer does when it comes free of the truck.

Don't bother with general support, email that straight to the engineering department. Ideally, take a new picture first, with a 5-6" machinist's scale (fancy ruler) next to the crack

Include in the body of the letter the failure to act by the general support staff.

Then send copies to the, Marketing department, Engineering Department, Local Store, Local State Representative, State DOT, State Highway patrol and anyone else you can think of.

Note on each of the copies, who received a copy of the information.

Now a failure to respond may have consequences and I suspect that results will be forthcoming.

In reply to aussiesmg:

I've never had to go that far, but excellent plan. In my experience, it seems display of a temperature calibrated ruler to the right people commands some respect and E36 M3 suddenly gets taken care of.