Apologies if this subject has been done to death but my ability to search the site seems not to work so I'm unable to find previous threads.
I am looking for a new motorhome and am quite frankly horrified that manufacturers seem happy to sell 7m long vans with apparently reasonable payloads but which will overload the rear axle when only a fraction of the manufacturer's payload is on board. This seems to me to be misleading at best and sharp practice at worst. The manufacturers seem to cover their rears with weasel words in the small print in the brochure which essentially say that their weight figures may not be right and it is entirely the user's responsibility to load the van in a manner that remains legal.
I accept that it is the user's responsibility to ensure that their van is operated in a legal fashion but it seems difficult to establish whether a van can meet the users intended payload needs before actually buying it and weighing it on a weighbridge. Myself and good wife have calculated that we have a required payload of 320 kg. I don't regard this as unreasonably high. When you look at the manufacturer's payload figures this seems quite easy to accommodate with most 7m long vans. However, when you do the calculations of where the load is to be placed in the van it rapidly becomes clear that for many vans our payload figure is about the maximum the can be used before the rear axle load reaches its limit.
Since the manufacturer's mass figures have a +/-5% allowance then I have some difficulty determining whether a 7m van can really accommodate what I consider to be a fairly modest payload. Given the sums of money involved in buying a motorhome, purchasing one and then weighing it to discover whether it is suitable or not is not the sort of gamble that I am comfortable taking.
An option at some cost is to pay for a van that is built on a maxi chassis and whose rear axle limit is much higher than that of the 'normal' chassis - these seem to be rare in the price bracket within which we are constrained. The answer then seems to be that we must stick with nothing longer than 6m (like our present van) where the overhangs are generally about half those of the 7m vans and the rear axle doesn't get overloaded so easily.
When one considers that many of the longer vans will be attractive to families who will no doubt have a required payload much higher than ours I am at a loss to understand how people manage to keep these vans loaded legally.
The question is - all these 'reasonably priced' 7m vans we see on the roads - are they driven by folk who have meagre payload needs or are they overloaded? I suspect that for any user who relies on the manufacturer's data and the dealer's advice without doing their own investigations there is a strong possibility that they will end up unwittingly driving a van whose rear axle is overloaded.
On one of my other posts I asked for help in dealing with the bewildering choice of vans out there and how to narrow it down to find what we wanted. Folk kindly offered useful advice. Now I find that the whole issue of payloads and axle limits makes it quite easy to rule out lots of vans that at first seemed attractive. My brain hurts!
Mike
I am looking for a new motorhome and am quite frankly horrified that manufacturers seem happy to sell 7m long vans with apparently reasonable payloads but which will overload the rear axle when only a fraction of the manufacturer's payload is on board. This seems to me to be misleading at best and sharp practice at worst. The manufacturers seem to cover their rears with weasel words in the small print in the brochure which essentially say that their weight figures may not be right and it is entirely the user's responsibility to load the van in a manner that remains legal.
I accept that it is the user's responsibility to ensure that their van is operated in a legal fashion but it seems difficult to establish whether a van can meet the users intended payload needs before actually buying it and weighing it on a weighbridge. Myself and good wife have calculated that we have a required payload of 320 kg. I don't regard this as unreasonably high. When you look at the manufacturer's payload figures this seems quite easy to accommodate with most 7m long vans. However, when you do the calculations of where the load is to be placed in the van it rapidly becomes clear that for many vans our payload figure is about the maximum the can be used before the rear axle load reaches its limit.
Since the manufacturer's mass figures have a +/-5% allowance then I have some difficulty determining whether a 7m van can really accommodate what I consider to be a fairly modest payload. Given the sums of money involved in buying a motorhome, purchasing one and then weighing it to discover whether it is suitable or not is not the sort of gamble that I am comfortable taking.
An option at some cost is to pay for a van that is built on a maxi chassis and whose rear axle limit is much higher than that of the 'normal' chassis - these seem to be rare in the price bracket within which we are constrained. The answer then seems to be that we must stick with nothing longer than 6m (like our present van) where the overhangs are generally about half those of the 7m vans and the rear axle doesn't get overloaded so easily.
When one considers that many of the longer vans will be attractive to families who will no doubt have a required payload much higher than ours I am at a loss to understand how people manage to keep these vans loaded legally.
The question is - all these 'reasonably priced' 7m vans we see on the roads - are they driven by folk who have meagre payload needs or are they overloaded? I suspect that for any user who relies on the manufacturer's data and the dealer's advice without doing their own investigations there is a strong possibility that they will end up unwittingly driving a van whose rear axle is overloaded.
On one of my other posts I asked for help in dealing with the bewildering choice of vans out there and how to narrow it down to find what we wanted. Folk kindly offered useful advice. Now I find that the whole issue of payloads and axle limits makes it quite easy to rule out lots of vans that at first seemed attractive. My brain hurts!
Mike
