Truck Rental in Ireland : Driving a rental truck on a car licence

April 24, 2010 - PRLog -- Truck Rental in Ireland: what type of truck can I rent on a car licence?

In Ireland, the standard drivers licence is the category “B” licence. When you pass your driving test this is the licence that is issued. This licence does allow people to drive more than just a car, thats right, you can rent a truck with your standard Irish driving licence.

When you examine your licence you will see that there are 2 things that it entitles you to do, firstly drive s vehicle with up to eight occupants and secondly drive a truck with a GVW of up to 3500kgs. Its the second part that we are interested in. But what exactly is a truck up to 3500kgs? And what is GWW.
GVW is gross vehicle weight. This is the combined weight of the truck, body, occupants and payload. This might seem quite a lot of weight but it is not. Take the chassis of the hire truck, it will typically weigh about 2 tonne and the body in the region of 700 kilos, this leaves the vehicle with an effective payload of 800 kilos.
If you take the typical Irish hire truck with a 14ft body it is quite easy to overload the vehicle. A simple way to check if you are operating within the law is to ask the rental company for the unladen weight of the vehicle. Any good rental truck provider will give this information to a customer. For further infomation on truck rental information in ireland please Visit http://www.vanrentals.ie  for indepth guides for housemover and company truck rental use.

In Ireland, the Gardai are becoming increasingly interested in overloading of vehicles and are far better informed on the law than in times past. Inside any commercial vehicle in Ireland there will be a chassis plate with the GVW of the vehicle. In common rental trucks in Ireland these plates are usually located behind the passenger seat.

All this leads us to the conclusion that if you need to move a large volume of goods in a rental truck, that’s fine, provided that the payload is within the GVW of the truck. If you need to carry a heavier load, it is often better to hire a van which has a 3500kgs GVW. The reasons for this are that the van is likely to weight about 1900kgs all in. This leaves the rental van customer with an effective payload of 1600kgs about twice of what they could legally carry on the hire truck.

Taking the above to its logical conclusion, if you are renting a truck in Ireland, pay close attention to what weight you need to carry and ask the truck provider for details in relation to payload. It is common to see rental trucks driving the roads of Dublin with loads far in excess of their specification, while this was acceptable in the past, current legislation and checkpoints make this a practice with a short future.

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We are a commercial vehicle provider in Dublin, Ireland. We provide hire vans and rental trucks on short term and contract hire.
Our contract hire department deals with companies, councils and multinationals by assisting with vehicle procurement.