Apparently, 90% of caravans are overloaded in QLD.
New Caravan owners also don’t know how to tow.
My father had two different people independently tell him not to put too much weight at the back of the caravan.
He knew better. He put most of the big, heavy stuff at the back of the caravan. It was more convenient to load it that way because you could still get in the door.
He rolled the caravan. Yes, rolled. Some people hear “Don’t touch the electric fence” and immediately poke it to check. Not a good listener, my dad.
I shifted a van from Mount Isa to Mackay about 15 years ago. Wasn’t a big van, an 18 or 20 footer, and I had an old EB Falcon to tow it with. It had a lot of stuff in it. Every little nook and cranny had something in it, I’d been living in it for a few years, as you kind of do in Mount Isa.
Got about 40ks out of town and after the third time I had to hit the electric brakes to straighten things up, I pulled off the road. I took everything out of the top cupboards and put it on the floor, and shifted a lot of stuff that was at the back of the van (like the heavy annexe canvas) right to the front of the van.
That turned a 80kmhr pushy swaying nightmare into a 100kmhr easy tow.
That’s cool. OK, so 60/40 front to rear is the ideal weight distribution, and they show what happens if you have more weight in the rear, but what happens if you have too much weight in the front?
Edit: Found a longer video that goes over things in more detail. Got some good other videos like How to control trailer swaying. Cripes. You only have 3 seconds from the start of the sway before it will be out of control!
My father had the same attitude to standardised trailer wiring and came up with his own solution for adapting 5-pin and 7-pin ISO 1724 and AS 2513. He would jumper across pins 1-2 and 4-5.
He could not comprehend why the electric brakes would surge when indicating left and why the reverse lights would also light up when indicating right.
There is no licence requirement to know anything about towing.
Own a car/truck with a tow bar?
Fill your boots.
Unfortunately, our society demands that everybody has a licence. The social expectation is that if you do have a licence, you automaticly have the ability to drive a vehicle with a 3500kg GVM with a 3500kg Trailer at 110km/h, even if you are hardly competent enough to drive an Automatic Nissan Micra.
Add the fact that most drivers aren’t even able to change a tyre, let alone calculate GVM, GTM, ATM, ball weight, etc and you have a major traffic disaster on your hands.
I don’t see any reason that towing could require a separate class of licence from the general open licence. As this original article and the comments in this post show, it requires more specialist knowledge that isn’t required for driving a normal car.
Realistically, either the basic knowledge to tow safely should also be required to obtain a normal licence (which would be problematic because as you suggest, we build our cities and towns to be incredibly car-dependent and it would be imposing a significant extra toll on people), or towing should require passing a separate test with towing-specific knowledge. The majority of people won’t need that, so don’t need to worry about studying for it. Easy.
I’m not one for unnecessary legislation, but at some point, we have to ensure that people appreciate that they are in control of 7 tonnes of moving vehicle.
I think that classes of heavy vehicle licence should be introduced; Light Combination and Medium Combination.
Light Combination would include using anything outside the factory dimensions of the vehicle; bike racks, roof racks, unbraked trailers.
Medium Combination would include anything requiring electric brakes.
The problem is that caravan/trailer manufacturers would be very unhappy about these restrictions to their customer-base.
https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/licensing/driver-licensing/types
https://www.mylicence.sa.gov.au/my-heavy-vehicle-licence
https://www.transport.wa.gov.au/licensing/upgrade-add-a-licence.asp
bike racks, roof racks
Eh, I wouldn’t be supportive of this.
I’ll admit I’ve never actually driven with either, but because they don’t have their own separate contact with the ground, and the added weight is extremely low (less than the weight of a child), it doesn’t require any extra knowledge to be able to actually drive it safely. So there’s no case to be made for requiring additional training and licensing.
I have seen plenty of clueless drivers with roof racks, awnings, roof-top-tents, etc. who are not qualified to drive with these additions.
Customers smash sunroofs, drive into underground car parks, mount 120kg roof-top-tents on vehicles with a 50kg maximum dynamic roof load.
There are even hard-core off-roaders who don’t understand that when a vehicle is driving on uneven terrain, that you can’t carry the same roof load as on flat paved roads.
Other people carry 130kg dirt bikes on hitch bicycle trays on towbars with a 75kg ball weight.
There needs to be a minimum level of training for people to carry anything outside the footprint of their vehicle. GVMs need to be included in basic driver training.
If you can’t understand the Mechanics of why all of the cases I have described are bad, you are in the class of people who need more training.
There has to be a minimum level of training in order for anything outside the standard footprint of the vehicle.
