[CARNAMA]

Most of us (including me) travel hundreds of miles with friends and family and carry lot of stuff for the road. We often boast on how our cars are loaded to the brim and share pictures of it.

The driver side door sticker has the Gross Vehicle Weight mentioned but most of us are not aware of the Kerb Weight (Empty Vehicle Weight).

The difference between Gross Weight & Kerb Weight is the payload which the vehicle is allowed to handle safely. The payload includes passenger weight, luggage, fuel & or any additional accessory. This payload affects suspension, acceleration, braking etc...

We travel through different terrain at reasonable speed, how many of us are mindful of payload and try to keep it within the limits (assuming we know what the limit is).

Let me admit that I don't, I only got to know about this when I was researching on to buy travel trailer. Payload of the car should also include towing weight if you're hauling a travel trailer. I realized that I've travelled with lot of luggage, people, for thousands of miles without knowing how it affects vehicles performance & safety aspects.

Would like to know from this community, how aware/concerned are we on this payload concept.

Mods ~ Please merge with existing thread if appropriate.

[TrackDay]

Originally Posted by CARNAMA

The difference between Gross Weight & Kurb Weight is the payload which the vehicle is allowed to handle safely. The payload includes passenger weight, luggage , fuel & or any additional accessory . This payload affects suspension, acceleration, braking etc...

I guess I am not that aware by the technical aspects of it. I have never hauled a trailer in India nor outside India. But yes, I guess one becomes aware when the vehicle becomes too heavy and difficult to drive. Example airport trips or outstation weekend trip. It is common sense not to go way too overboard as the whole dynamics of the car will change. Also abroad chances are you could be penalized. I guess in the general context still a lot of folks are not that aware I guess.

What payload ?

[RedTerrano]

Payload? What's that?
We are a country where everyone is busy in pursuit of a Guinness World Record for the maximum number of people crammed in one vehicle!





And no. I don't know about my car's payload either.

[Kosfactor]

9-10 medium sized people is around the rated capacity. ~ 700 Kgs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76zPLht8beA

Jokes apart, private vehicles do not tow here, not allowed as far as I remember. Not a problem around farm lands even on public roads though.

For towing recreational trailers, you need to know the RAW as well apart from payload. its not always a 50-50 split.

If you have filled all seats and the boot is full, chances are you cannot tow anything meaningful with most vehicles.

What happens abroad is this overlanding fancy dress party, wherein a perfectly usable pickup truck is dressed with 40 inch tyres, winch, lift kit, freezer, recovery decorations, additional fuel tank and two spare tires, roof top tent, Awning and what not. Now you add people, their luggage and then add a trailer to its rear end. It only takes time even with careful usage to break something. Even worse it only takes one rough landing to bend the frame or even break it in some cases, pretty common these days.

[GTO]

99.99% of private car owners will never exceed the payload rating. If your car is rated for 5 onboard + luggage, you could even load it up with a heavy passenger or two and you'll be okay. Manufacturers will always "overengineer" their cars a little bit, allowing for user error.

There are rare exceptions though. The E2O had a payload rating of 300 kg. That's easy to exceed with 4 onboard (although room for them would be the bigger limitation).

Originally Posted by TrackDay

What payload ?

No surprise that all of the above examples are robust body-on-frame vehicles; their manufacturers know they'll be overloaded, especially in rural areas.

[the_joker]

This is something I'm always aware of. I know my Ecosport's load rating is approx 400 kg. When I have to carry 5 people, I try to minimize luggage.

[Raghu M]

I think the XUV300's gross weight should not exceed 1750 kgs. I am aware of it and know that trips have to be planned keeping that in mind. The curb weight of the petrol version is around 1.3 tonnes, so I have a margin of around 450 kgs to carry which is decent.

[Samurai]

I first understood this concept in 1979, when I was only 10. We had 2 weeks holidays, and my dad sent my brother and I to my uncle's home for the duration, with his office peon. After we reached a town called Kushalnagar, and we found out there were no buses that day towards our final destination, a small village called Kanagalu about 18kms away. It was already past 4pm.

Right, but there was hope. An ambassador taxi offered ride to anyone who wanted to reach Kanagalu. He had lots of takers, but the taxi driver put his foot down at 14. Yeah, that is 12 adults and us two kids (14 & 10). Then most cars had bench seats in front.

Just 4kms into the trip, the car stops with a broken axle. I had no idea what an axle was, but I understood the car can't move anymore, not that day. Since we knew there were no buses that day, there was only one choice. We walked the remaining 14kms in about 3 hours and reached uncle's home for dinner. There were couple of very good orators in the group and time passed very fast.

After that experience, I never got into such overcrowded cars or let people overcrowd my cars.

[VKumar]

Payload? Capacity?

Am I not supposed to use my car at the fullest?

Anyone who wants to know about stuffing more and more people inside, here is an i20 with 15 occupants; and a live demo of fitting them all inside, and the driver still had his full space, and is claiming that a few more can come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am4NbUITNiA

Confession: On the last day of high school, I had D+9 guys stuffed in a Maruti 800!

Driver with 2 in front, 4 in the rear seat and 3 in the boot, with bootlid open.

And the 800 took the entire load gracefully.

And yes, boys do feel happy while doing such stuff, it delivers immense satisfaction riding in a hatchback with 7-8 friends of yours!

[GrandTourer]

Interesting thread!

We Indians are experts at extracting every last bit from our possessions - T-shirt becomes cleaning cloth, toothpaste tube squeezed to the last bit, water in shampoo bottles. How would we not extract the most out of our cars?

Back in my first job, we used to travel 6 up in a Tata Nano with me behind the wheels, one shotgun and 4 in the back. The Tata pulled through almost all the road conditions with 6 pax, but it was the last bit that it could never do - climbing the steep ramp out of apartment complex gate.
I'm sure it was not supposed to haul close to 400 kgs of human. And no, I do not know the rated payload of any of the vehicles I drove. But it was only the Nano that we stuffed to the brim. Never after.

[nagr22]

Originally Posted by TrackDay

What payload ?

In the context of vehicles designed to carry people for commute like metro trains, there is a concept called Crush Load. It basically is the load on the vehicle when every square inch of its cabin is filled with passengers and luggage.

Quoting from Wikipedia,

A crush load is a level of passenger loading in a transport vehicle which is so high that passengers are "crushed" against one another. It represents an extreme form of passenger loading, and normally considered to be representative of a system with serious capacity limitations.[1] Crush loads result from too many passengers within a vehicle designed for a much smaller number. Crush loaded trains or buses are so heavily loaded that for most passengers physical contact with several other nearby passengers is impossible to avoid.

I was surprised to learn that designing a vehicle even for this extreme measure is not sufficient for Indian trains and they had to come up with something called super dense crush load
Quoting from the same Wikipedia article,

In India, the term "super dense crush load" [4] has been coined by railway officials to describe passenger loads on peak-hour trains operating on the Mumbai Suburban Railway when carriages built for 200 passengers carry over 500, translating to 14–16 people per square metre.[5]

I doubt whether our cars are designed with such scenarios in mind but I won't rule out the possibility entirely either. If you visit any rural village of India you will find even a humble auto carrying 10 passengers or more without damaging the axle. I am sure the manufacturers of certain vehicles like Bolero, Qualis etc know that their end users will abuse it close to the crush load and would have definitely designed the components considering these scenarios.

[V.Narayan]

In the bad old days I know for a fact that the venerable Tata 1210 two axle truck was designed for regular carriages of 16 tonnes and the safety engineering was over and above that. Axle breakdown was at ~20+ tonnes of payload!!! Similarly the Tata 1616 was designed for 24 tonnes regular loading. Practical and sensible thing to do on India

Originally Posted by Raghu M

I think the XUV300's gross weight should not exceed 1750 kgs. I am aware of it and know that trips have to be planned keeping that in mind. The curb weight of the petrol version is around 1.3 tonnes, so I have a margin of around 450 kgs to carry which is decent.

What Raghu M are you an Indian? It is unpatriotic for any self respecting Indian to be concerned about his vehicle's payload.

[myavu]

Originally Posted by GTO

99.99% of private car owners will never exceed the payload rating. If your car is rated for 5 onboard + luggage, you could even load it up with a heavy passenger or two and you'll be okay. Manufacturers will always "overengineer" their cars a little bit, allowing for user error.

Absolute truth in my case. In the past 11 years my car was driven solo for almost 95% and rest with front passenger only. Very rarely 3rd and 4th passenger been seated.

[rdst_1]

I came across it when reading our car's manual a few months ago. It is mentioned as 350kgs for a Fiat Palio and includes 50kg capacity of the roof.

Your foray into trying to build and tow a trailer in India is something even I am interested in. My first interest is in trying to get an Isuzu S-Cab on white number plates which I don't think will be too hard for me and after that design a trailer for carrying cattle.

[condor]

Yes - and a simple thumb-rule for folks who dont care to look it up - 400 total load for a hatch, 500 for a SUV. But these are the official figures, and often we see people going a bit beyond this.

But most times we fill up our vehicles with volume of luggage and not weights, though I recently did an overload of 100% of the rated capacity on a vehicle. An experience