Quote:
Originally Posted by harveyrv
... It is important to understand that none of these ratings can be exceeded, either individually or collectively. You can't pick and choose which rating that you want to use. These ratings are legal ratings and can be used against a person in a court of law when determining the fault of an accident and any possible criminal negligence. It will also be used by insurance companies to accept or deny coverage (especially in the event of an injury or death).
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Insurance and towing overweight:
- I've never seen an auto insurance policy that has an exclusion for towing overweight. If there is evidence of one, I'd like to see it. If not, please don't tell us that such exclusions exist.
- Accidents are usually caused by negligence, and accidents are why we have insurance. My insurance policy has an exclusion for a collision caused deliberately, but not for one caused by negligence, whether gross or otherwise.
- Manslaughter convictions are often sought for grossly negligent drivers (drunk driving, inoperable braking systems, or in a reach, how about towing a TrailManor at 85mph in a 55 zone. I've never heard of gross negligence charges brought for an RV driver, but of course it's possible. Ask any cop: such danger as we RV owners might produce for others on the highways is broadly considered to be the product of our ignorance and not our intentions (this is unlike commercial vehicles, where drivers are professionally employed, trained and hopefully accountable to higher standards that should go with their 80,000 pound loads).
- I've never heard of the over-weight status of a recreational vehicle being held as the direct cause of a motor vehicle accident or a charge of serious negligence, although it has probably been a contributing factor in tens of thousands of truck accidents. If there is a reference, let's hear it.
- Every experienced trucker I've ever known would freely admit to occasionally being on the road overweight.
- Vehicle durability is a major issue, particularly for things you do a lot. A heavy tow will probably reduce the service life of your transmission, even if it is not over your tow vehicle ratings. If you're going to regularly tow in the mountains or tow 20000 miles per year, you need a different tow vehicle than the guy who tows 500 miles per year on the plains. If you have a vehicle that's known for it's history of transmission weakness, you ought to have reservations about what you choose to tow with it.
The best I could do in a quick Google search is this Connecticut reference that mentions an irresponsible truck driver and their law about overweight commercial vehicles. But it's about commercial vehicles, "significantly" overweight, and "proximate cause", which would have to mean that the weight was the thing that actually caused the accident. Overweight would be much, much harder to prove than "Failure to maintain control of a Motor Vehicle", "Driving too fast for conditions", or "Disconnected brakes", all of which are much more commonly held to be proximate causes of accidents.
http://www.cga.ct.gov/2007/rpt/2007-R-0214.htm
RV towing, in general:
Towing is a serious business, and needs careful attention to the details. Cars and light trucks are probably not tow rated nearly as carefully by their manufacturers as heavy trucks are. I offer as evidence the difficulty we have in getting the basic information needed about load and tow ratings for the vehicles our posters bring us. If it were done as carefully as it should be, manufacturers would put it all in one place and post it on the Internet for more than just their current models.
But of far greater consequence to RV'ers than the weight of the tow, just in my opinion as a guy who's owned a lot of RVs for a lot of years, is the way the load is balanced. When you unload the front axle by heavy loads in the back, you are unloading your steering and braking capability, and you are likely to risk overloading your rear axle as well. When a vehicle is aft-loaded, it's harder to control whether it's a heavy truck or your Hundai with too many bags of fertilizer in the trunk. Granted, of course, a tow that's too heavy for the tow vehicle could make it impossible to do enough to fix the handling problems.
The only entry in this forum I could find about brake fading with a TrailManor (help us out if there are more), was a case of somebody whose brakes went into meltdown on a long grade out West. It's been posted elsewhere here: If you set your brake controller too aggressively, your trailer is doing too much of the braking. There are two possible serious consequences. First, abusing your trailer brakes this way causes them to exceed the load they are supposed to be stopping, and can lead to failure.
In this case, you'd be in worse shape, the heavier the tow vehicle you have! Second, if you try to set your trailer brakes aggressively enough so that your dry pavement stopping distance is the same as without the trailer, you're going to be able to put the trailer into a skid on surfaces with less traction than dry pavement. Your tow vehicle probably has anti-lock brakes. Your trailer does not, and vehicles that lock up rear axles do 180's in panic stops (I owned a 1980 Chevy Citation once, but that's another story).
And finally, the most important thing: Panic stops in your current-technology, traction-controlled tow vehicle are scary. But as pointed out by PopBeavers earlier in this thread, panic stops while towing have too many variables to ever be taken for granted. The only safe way to tow is with great care and appropriately slower speed for your vehicle and conditions.