In contrast to the header, I am considering buying a car trailer big enough to take a Land Rover. (Capacity around 2.5 tonnes).
My reasoning is that I need a "new" Land Rover and will require the means to collect it. That means two drivers, or hitch-hiking, training, busing, or flying a long distance. I'm thinking that there must be others in a similar situation and I might be able to justify the expense by hiring it out occasionally.
So, (a) what are the legal implications of hiring out a trailer and (b) is there likely to be any demand? Now, I know you guys won't let me down! Go on, talk me out of it. Please!
I dunno the legal ramifications, but can offer the following anecdotal tales.
Mate had exactly the same problem. He wanted a Landrover and had found one in Fife which wasn't driveable and he needed to get it home so bought a car trailer. That bit went fine.
At home he decided he'd do the same and hire it out to friends, acquaintances etc First few 'customers' he had no problems with but then he got it back one day with a punctured tyre, a light pod missing and various scratches, dents etc. The chap he'd loaned it too wouldn't cough up and all repairs came out of his pocket. Turned out that he'd not included any insurance or legal waiver form or indeed any paperwork for the safe return of trailer and had relied on 'knowing' the people he loaned it too, I'd suggest this isn't a good thing.
He then set himself up as a 'man with a trailer who'll collect vehicles and transport them anywhere', which worked infinitely better. He got paid up-front and whilst the didn't make a lot of money soon covered the cost of the trailer and began to make some small profit.
Until he had an accident whilst carrying someone's car. Again he had been a numpty and didn't take out enough insurance, though he argued that that was why he'd used a broker to advise him.
I'd suggest that if you do loan the trailer out, do it as a small, part-time even, business and not as 'favours' for people you know.
Don't forget the damage to the trailer, most trailer hire places will have numerous tales of woe regarding trailers wrecked by customers, people who don't use trailers much (like me) haven't got a clue how to treat them, especially when it comes to reversing.
Also there's the common misconception that if the trailer starts to snake, you speed up to stop it --- the worst thing to do according to any trailer shop I've ever spoken to. The last one I dealt with complained that he fairly regularly loses trailers to people going too fast, getting the trailer snaking, then speeding up to try and stop it.
It seems like a lot of hassle for £50 or so per day.
I had similar thoughts about a horse box....but a short spell of dealing with the sort of horse owner we have around here quickly changed my mind.
One horse was very reluctant to be loaded. So, of course, I helped too although my knowledge of horses is minimal. Eventually, the horse was loaded and transported. Turned out the horse had laminitis which can come on very quickly.
One of the people involved got nasty, said we should not have even attempted to load the horse, called in the RSPCA and there was talk of prosecutions. But apparently this condition can come on very quickly indeed (as in this case, there was no reason to think the horse was anything other than nervous of entering the box) and no one could be blamed. The horse was later destroyed. Moral -- never volunteer.
Everything is stacked against doing this sort of thing as a part-time business.
Word of mouth will get you a bit of work, but "friends" expect to get the trailer cheaper than a normal commercial rate. Then when you've quoted a price, they'll want odd little extras throwing in, like securing straps. It seems mean, doesn't it, wanting an extra couple of quid for straps, but they mysteriously suffer a great deal more wear and tear in one hire than a month of your own use.
And so does the trailer. There are _lots_ of ways to abuse a car trailer: loading it "on the twist"; spinning the wheels of a car being driven on, thus damaging the deck; putting a heavy car far too far forward, grossly overloading the front axle; dragging a car on with seized wheels, damaging winch and deck; using it for unsuitable loads, whether it be machinery that imposes loads in the wrong place, or heaps of rammel that accompany a classic car and chatter and fret their way into the deck; kerbing tyres at speed; pulling lighting cables out; and, of course hitting things like gateposts and other cars.
You can put all the terms in your hire agreement that you like - and believe me, I have (I used to write commercial contracts): but there's a big difference between having a contract and enforcing it, particularly in these "customer is king" days where "unfair" always seems to hit the trader, not the consumer.
Then there's the real biggies: what happens if your customer decides that towing's a doddle, so it's a steady 75 down the hill on the M5 until suddenly he sees the trailer overtaking him, dragging a few holidaymakers with it? OK - you know it's not your trailer's fault, or your fault for not ensuring the driver knew what he was doing, but can you afford to go to court to defend yourself, let alone pay the damages if you are found negligent? Easy - insure it. Yes, right. Getting any insurance for "motor trade" is like joining a medieval guild: "you've been doing it how long??" "OK, that'll be your first-born child plus the gross national product of wazzeyestan, please".
If you're running a big enough business, you can probably get this particular public liability cover thrown in with all your other insurance, but as a one-off - ouch!
It's going to be increasingly difficult to get customers: very few people seem to be taking the trailer tests, so it will soon only be old men who are still allowed to tow big trailers, and I saw in last week's papers the suggestion that the new EU driving licence harmonisation will put a stop to them, too. Ever-tightening legislation and enforcement will also soon, I'd guess, stop people towing beyond the ultra-conservative manufacturer's limits, and even with the growth of
4x4s, many of the toy ones aren't rated for towing proper loads. As an aside here, google this group for just how low the official towing capability of Series Land Rovers is. (cue: "I can tow a house with mine" (but legally?)).
You need the right premises, too. Trailers take up a lot of room, and numpties who hire them will not be able to back them into your drive ready for the next person. So you might finish up doing all the hitching and unhitching in the road, and having to fire up your own truck to put it away. Have you got tolerant neighbours, or will some curtain-twitcher report you for running a business without planning permission?
To go down the other route - providing a complete collection service, saves the "what's he doing to my trailer?" problem, but makes the insurance problem even worse. A couple of thousand pounds for motor trader insurance may be bearable if you're working every day, but it's
80 quid on each job if you're only getting one a fortnight. The trouble is that, as a business, the barrier to entry is relatively low, and once you're in it, whether with a trailer or mackled-up Transit, the temptation is to try to get business solely on price, simply to recover a few of your overheads. So you finish up doing a day's work, and once you've topped your tank up you might have a hundred quid to pay for insurance, maintenance (tow motor and trailer), tyres, depreciation, the advert to get next week's job - and your national insurance stamp, council tax, and cheese sarnie.
And of course, you'll need a tachograph, in theory.
If you're the sort of person who breezes through life without a care in the world, who's got no money so doesn't care if he's taken to the cleaners, and no imagination about what could go wrong, or you can tack it onto an existing business, go for it.
On or around 5 Apr 2006 22:12:45 GMT, Derry Argue enlightened us thusly:
everyone I know with a trailer won't lend or hire it, cos they get broken.
as to hiring yourself and the trailer to move other people's stuff, people tend not to want to pay the resulting cost - you've got to be talking a minimum of a pound a mile to come close to making money at it.
Plan C, of course, is to go buy it and mysteriously break down just outside the old owners house. You do have recovery on your AA membership, don't you?
Utterly immoral, but when you look at the cost of transporting or hiring trailers it's not hard to see why people do it.
Land Rover do seem to have an uncanny ability to reproduce on their owners drives ;-)
I volunteer for duty! Don't make it too far away or if so make it before the 18th :-)
Don't know just how much demand there would be here, Derry. My neighbour is a very nice man and willingly offers me his very nice, very large 20ft bed trailer which holds any LR product with ease. I don't think that there will be that many people who would pay for a hire, if so then there are hire places in Inverness that they would probably go to. I haven't been up to Ardgay garage recently, but does the guy that took that over still have Jimmy's trailers? They definately were hired out on occasion. Tom Rob has something large as well? Nothing beats having your own though, especially since you have the space to store it, so I wouldn't like to talk you out of it (and it would be a sight easier to drive round the single track roads than my neighbours ;-)
On or around Thu, 6 Apr 2006 09:35:02 +0100, "Autolycus" enlightened us thusly:
The used to quote 4 tons[1], but then there came tachographs and it went down to 3500Kg to avoid being a goods vehicle under certain conditions. At one point they quoted 5T for Daihatsus...
[1] Mind, you had to know how to pull off in low box and shift into high on the move to do that, unless it was pointing down hill to start with :-)
I think both you and Austin are right, as far as I recall the 4 ton Austin mentions is for close coupled brakes, four wheels and a petrol engine. Diesels are rated at 3 tons. Overrun brakes like the vast majority of people use is limited to 2 tonnes, non-braked is 500Kg. Cross country braked is 1 ton.
Different owners manuals seem to give different info, but the above is sensible to me.
Series III was good for 6 tonnes GTW and this could be 4 tonnes with brakes run off the service brake or 3.5 tonnes overrun (subject to tow hitch). The 101 was (and is) the worst at 1.5tonnes AFAIK.
Dual purpose is still exempt up to 3.5 tonnes of trailer isn't it?
" snipped-for-privacy@macleod-group.com" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com:
That's what was going through my head. I hired one locally last time to transport a Peugeot 504 for parts from Rockfield (5 miles?) and it felt positively dangerous. I am quite sure it was illegal!
Maybe you saw the Ifor Williams for sale in ScotAds? Tempting, but I think it will be trains and thumbing. The caveats on here have already reduced me to a quivering nervous wreck -- and I haven't even seen the trailer yet! Incidentally, the seller says he replaces them every 18 months which, knowing Ifor Williams, probably means he gets the use of them for next to nothing.
Around 5 years ago, I was amazed to find in the Range Rover Repair Operations Manual (AKM3630 Edition 7) (Section 04-6) that that the Maximum Permissible Towed Weight is given as only 2000kg. This started me off trying to get a proper answer from Land Rover about towing weights for all their old products. I had a hell of a job getting them to answer at all, but I finally got two things in writing: a letter saying that Range Rovers of all ages had a towing weight of 3500kg (but with no explanation for their other value in the Manual); and eventually, I received a faxed list from the archivist at Gaydon, which he said he had compiled from various handbooks. He told me that he was the person who answered questions from Police forces on this subject, and these were the figures he quoted to them. The weakness of his list is that he doesn't reference his sources, and he doesn't explicitly state that they are for over-run brakes, though it's reasonable to assume they are.
A few examples from his list:
Series IIA or III 88" petrol - 1800kg, diesel - 1497kg Series IIA or III 109" petrol - 1600kg, diesel - 1315kg Series IIA 1-ton 4 or 6-cyl petrol - 1600kg
While these figures don't have the force of law that modern maximum towing figures for commercials do, I think it would be hard to defend yourself, either in court or to your insurers, if you exceeded them. If anyone has the handbook for their vehicle showing a higher figure, then they would, of course, be in a strong position.
Nope.
formatting link
"EC rules apply to drivers of most vehicles used for the carriage of goods
(including dual purpose vehicles), where the maximum permissible weight (see
Annex A) of the vehicle, including any trailer or semi-trailer, exceeds
3.5 tonnes:"
The only exemption from the EC rules that is relevant here is a "private use" one, and, arguably, this one:
"Vehicles with a gross vehicle weight (including batteries) of not more than 7.5
tonnes used for the carriage of goods and solely propelled by means of gas or
electricity (this does not include petrol or diesel start-up engines or any other
type of dual-fuelled engine)."
Does this cover lpg conversions with the petrol tank removed? Who knows? Not VOSA, ime.
It is really sad when Gaydon have people who don't care about LR products or the potential implications of their shoddy, inacurate presentation of "numbers" has on people who actually use LR vehicles. As you say, there is absolutely no mention of different towing capabilities even though LR are VERY SPECIFIC about the limits and the braking methods ON and OFF road - the limits are different. I really hope that no one has been prosecuted based on these figures. Nearly every farmer who tows a trailer with a series would be done, based on that baffoons numbers. A 1-ton recovery truck (which is what a lot of them did for a living) couldn't even recover a land rover!
Gaydon should employ people who can read is the one thing I can say. About 2 seconds of searching online I found the following:
formatting link
Page 26, small box on right hand side "maximum permissable towed weights" gives figures that are in line with what I quoted earlier, for the 4 tons then I'd have to refer to another Series III manual to find that (the above is a repair operations manual). Don't suppose you have contact details for the person at Gaydon, do you? It just seems so wrong that they are giving out stuff like that. Dunsfold should be the guys who get to be definative about LRs vehicles..... at least they have a clue.
All I have now is a fax number, and the name "Richard", but I have looked up the letter I wrote to them in which I suggested (politely, of course), that they were talking out of an inappropriate orifice. This is what I wrote to them:
"TOWING WITH LAND ROVERS
In July this year I tried to establish the maximum permissible trailer weight for trailers with over-run brakes, towed on the road, in this country, by Series 2A or Series 3 Land Rovers. Land Rover Customer Support referred me to you, and after speaking to Richard, who I believe is the Archivist, but whose surname I am sorry I did not establish, he kindly faxed me a two-page list he had compiled from, I understand, various Owner's Handbooks.
This list consisted of four columns: model, Unl.W., GVW, and T/W, which an annotation showed as an abbreviation for Towing Weight. I was surprised by how low some of the T/W values were, and assumed that it was because they were so low there was no need to differentiate between towing over-run and coupled braked trailers. With some regret, I had to sell my 2A petrol 109", as its quoted T/W of 1600kg was rather lower than I needed to tow.
The subject of towing is frequently raised on the internet news group alt.fan.landrover, and on several occasions I have quoted figures from your faxed list. The reaction has often been incredulous, but no-one had been able to cite any better authority until recently, when a contributor from Australia quoted from his Owner's Handbook Part Number
607324A (p39)
Cross country; 1020kg.
Road & track with unbraked trailers; 500kg.
Road & track with overrun trailer brakes; 2040kg.
Trailer with four wheels and independent power brakes; Petrol; 4080kg, Diesel 3060kg.
These figures are significantly different to those in your faxed list.
I managed to have a quick look at a S2A Owner's Handbook (part number
606859) at an autojumble yesterday. This uses a slightly odd phrase like "maximum drawbar load", but then gives the same figures as your list. - right down to 1315kg for a LWB diesel. It then occurred to me that the handbook writer might have been using "load" in the sense of "horizontal force that the drawbar can exert, with the engine running at its speed for peak torque, in low ratio first"? A quick sum using the diesel engine max torque of 139Nm, an overall ratio of 40.688, transmission efficiency of say 80%, and a rolling radius for a 7.50x16 tyre of 350mm, gives a maximum pull (or push) of just under 13kN, which is very close to the 1315kg in the book. I do not have the torque figures for the petrol engine to do the same sum, but taking a guess at the rolling radius of SWB tyres certainly gives a similarly close result for the slightly higher figures for the SWB diesel in the handbook.
If I am correct in my supposition, the handbook figures bear no relationship to what Land Rovers can legally or even physically tow, since these figures are about lifting a weight vertically, not dragging a load that has rolling resistance but is not (usually!) on a vertical
slope. The real-life limitation is likely to be based on structural considerations (including dynamic loadings), stability at speed, braking capability (hence different values for overrun and coupled-brakes trailers), and even the ability to actually get the load up to the speed at which the engine develops maximum torque.
Is it possible that you may have misinterpreted the handbooks by translating "maximum drawbar load" into "(maximum permissible) towing weight", or have I misunderstood something? Since I understood Richard to say that these figures are sometimes quoted to Police forces enquiring about possible cases of overloading, it is perhaps of some importance to you to establish this beyond doubt.
Confusion, perhaps with a different origin, extends to more recent models, too. The Range Rover figure of 2000kg quoted on page 04-6 of Repair Operations Manual AKM3630 Edition 7 seemed very low, and eventually I received a letter from a Customer Care Executive (!) saying that the limit was actually 3500kg, without an explanation as to when, or why, the figure had changed.
While some members of the Land Rover fraternity will always take the "it moves it, I can tow it" approach, others, like myself, prefer to attempt to tow legally, which seems broadly to mean remaining within manufacturers' recommendations. Any help you can give to enable us to do this will be appreciated."
I'm still waiting for a reply, four and a half years later.
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