I had an Avensis 1.8l T3-X 5 door hatch until recently, I swapped for the new CR-V 2.2 Diesel.
The Avensis had a fixed towbar with an Alko towball, our caravan is a 5 berth Coachman weighing approx 1450kg fully laden, the caravan used to sit low at the nose on the towbar and the jockey wheel would ground on most speed bumps even at a crawl, however we towed all over Scotland last season with the Avensis, our 1.8l petrol did struggle on most hills, sitting at around 40mph, and took an age to get back up to speed, that said the car felt very stable while towing and we dearly loved the Avensis, so much so we almost bought a new 2.2 diesel version which knew had the torque to pull the caravan up these hills better. The reason we didn't was that I knew we were over our noseweight of 75Kg and that the caravan was over the same limit of 1300kg with the car. The CR-V tows very well but is a bit bouncy on minor roads which I didn't expect, My wife did mention a few times that she misses the Avensis.