What if your vehicles are getting heavier not lighter?

Trying to do things more efficiently makes perfect business sense.

Keeping costs down is something that every company has to do so it’s inevitable that some will try and do with a 3.5 tonne vehicle what they used to do with a larger weight capacity one. And high volume vans are a very common sight on our roads now.

They make an awful lot of sense for many people – no tachographs, no transport manager, no specialist training to drive one – to name a few. So it’s hardly surprising that for people who really don’t need a 7.5 tonner that they will try and do the work with something much cheaper to run.

But despite not being subject to many of the rules that larger vehicles are, they are still subject to overloading legislation. And if you do run larger vehicles, even though the vans don’t need to be on the operators licence, any transgressions will need to be reported to the authorities and could affect an ‘O’ licence renewal.

One of our customers had an interesting problem. The nature of their product had changed over the years and become much lighter and easier to handle. With a much lighter product to deliver, the decision was made to move away from 7.5 tonners to Luton bodied 3.5 tonners. The cost savings were considerable.

Axtec OnBoard Protecting Vans from Overloading

But there was one snag.

As part of their operation, they offered a recycling service. Taking away an old, and much heavier item, than the new one they were delivering. Potentially the vehicle could actually be heavier at the end of its round than it was at the beginning.

Fortunately not every customer had an old unit to recycle but the vehicle weights did need monitoring closely.

Regular readers will know that overloading adversely effects all the major components on the vehicle – brakes, clutch, steering – and could even invalidate insurance n the event of an accident.

So the solution was to fit Axtec OnBoard Axle LoadIndicators to the new fleet.

Showing the drivers the axle and gross weights together with an automatic overload warning at all time during the round solved the problem. No manual controls meant drivers had nothing to fiddle with or break and the customer calibration facility meant no expensive service engineers visits either.

Offering that all important recycling service became a major selling point for them. And with our help, no more risks of overloading either.