Another epic heavy towing failure and how you can avoid one
Just because you bought a dual-cab ute and enormous caravan doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing. This report is further proof that Australia’s vehicle licensing system needs to evolve.
The only downside to subscribing to the crowdfunded DashCam Owners Australia’s awesome YouTube channel is that you'll be compelled to spend a lot more of your life online, watching videos.
One of their latest features a tow vehicle in question which is a Ford Ranger and the driver at least in my estimation has failed the most basic spatial perception driving test of all time by attempting to fit the ute and caravan into a space insufficiently large.
Here’s what happened:
That is one of the most dangerous maneuvers that I think I've ever seen and the reason I'm gonna take the piss out of it is because if I say what I really think it'll just be unpleasant. The only mechanism I've got for coping with this kind of bad behaviour on the road is satire.
Overtaking a road train at high speed with such a heavy caravan behind: that's a fail. Then doing it with insufficient space given the traffic environment and the proximity and closing speed of oncoming traffic, that's disgraceful.
And then knowing that perhaps you're doing something stupid and pressing on - as opposed to just pulling the rip cord early by hitting the brakes and tucking back in behind the road train when it's safe to do so - this is also a comprehensive failure, negligence and downright dangerous.
What gets in the head of some people that they remain committed to such stupid behaviour on the roads? Nobody died in this case, which is an actual road-based miracle, unlike the luck of that Tesla cliff crash in California. But it could have easily been four dead.
Can you imagine the knock-on effect for the families and the first responders, the medical professionals back in emergency departments who have to pick up all of the pieces when this happens? The counselling, the debriefs, the funeral arrangements, the kids left without family members, the truckie who might have to carry on feeling unnecessarily guilty the rest of his career.
Just change a few of the variables and we would’ve been looking at a highway full of dead people, basically, and a spot on the news.
If you crash out on the road, it’s never you who has to pick up a broom and load up the ambulance; someone else does that.
TOWING BIG HEAVY THINGS
I’ve done so many reports on this website and YouTube channel regarding the dangers, the dynamics and the problems involved with towing enormous, heavy trailers. And overwhelmingly, the primary factor in all of them is weight.
So let’s talk about out anti-hero’s caravan in this case, a New Age Big Red ‘Club Lounge’. It’s NINE metres long, costs over $100,000 before you add any options, and its tare weight is 2.8 tonnes. At its maximum Aggregate Trailer Mass (ATM), that caravan weighs 3.4 tonnes, including 250kg of download on the towball. Empty it weighs between 25 and 30 per cent more than the Ranger XLT towing it. Fully loaded, the caravan weighs over 50 per cent more than the Ranger.
Just the toilet alone will carry 110 litres of actual effluent. For argument’s sake, let’s be generous and suggest that’s going weight about 100kg. Just the effluent.
The Big Red even comes:
complete with a washing machine
You don’t have to imagine a world where any brain-dead driver, in practice, can get their license in an old Mazda 2 or Toyota Yaris - just by making it around the block and not crashing or dying - and then shortly thereafter, they can upgrade to a mighty dual-axle, nine metre long, 3.4-tonne, effluent-sloshing wobble box like a New Age Big Red, and head off into the sunset toward a town near you.
And it only costs $100,000 - the same as 100 nights in five-star resorts.
The significant risk here, in every one of these heavily loaded configurations, is that it’s very easy to blow the Gross Combination Mass (GCM). It’s the legal limit that's easiest to blow and if we assume that the Ranger is an XLT, the kerb weight of XLT is 2230 kilos. The GVM's 3200kg, so there’s not as much risk of blowing that, as I see it, but the gross combination mass of six tonnes could be pretty close to illegal.
If we put two fairly large people in the Ranger (carnivores, obviously) at 200 kilos combined, then you’ve got to add a heavy duty towbar at about 40 kilos, and we've got that awning so that's got to be 10 kilos, there’s probably more items on board the ute like a Dometic fridge/freezer, food, baggage, possibly some firewood, tools - the list goes on, and on.
It's not very difficult to get up to 300kg of items on board the ute because you'd also want a fire extinguisher for outback travel, you'd want a second spare tyre, you'd want some recovery gear, you'd want some water just in case you decouple and go for a bit of a drive - these things are quite important for survival. So it's hard for me to see you getting away with less than 200 kilos of crap in the ute.
The caravan only halfway loaded to its ATM would mean 300kg of stuff, that's the van loaded to 3.1 tonnes, plus the curb weight of the ute at 2.23 tonnes, plus 470 kilos of stuff - that's 5800 kilos which is only 200 shy of the gross combination mass .
Although, if you fully load the Big Red you'll be 100 kilos over on GCM and you'll probably be over on towball download, unless you're pretty careful as well and you weigh it to confirm.
The limits on these vehicles are completely unrealistic in the context of safety and stability.
Check out my Complete Towing Guide: Everything you need to know >>
The anti-hero in this event has got to be sailing pretty close to the gross combination mass limit, if not over it. Not that we can find out now because it's all just shrapnel scattered across the roadside. It could easily have been a legal load, but possibly also technically overloaded. Almost certainly it was dangerous and unstable in-extremis, however.
I would categorise this as an absurd combination to drive a long way. It’s such an unstable, high, and heavy trailer. These trailers, caravans etc are intrinsically unstable because they've got axles in the centre which makes them prone to pitching up and down, and yawing left and right - rotating like an LP record in a horizontal plane - which is exactly what happened in this crash.
It's not that that specific caravan is unstable, it's that all ‘pig’ type trailers (central axles) are unstable in pitch and yaw. That's just the nature of the business.
As for the driver, I don't know how else to categorise this and it's only my opinion, but insufficient training and/or insufficient ability to be let loose on our roads with a combination of that nature under his belt. Conservatism is always your ally in these extreme towing situations. Common sense doesn’t hurt either.
Watch the full report above to hear what the nuts had to say in the Twitter comments of the original DashCam Owners Australia video post.
Or you can check out my in-depth How to Avoid Towing Disaster Q&A >> responding to comments an criticism from our previous towing crash video courtey of DCOA.
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