How Much Weight Can a Van Carry?
Understanding how much weight your van can carry is massively important. Overloading your van can result in some serious consequences, from engine and transmission strain, sluggish journeys, damage to the van’s suspension and hefty fines from the police.
What is a payload?
In simple terms, the payload of your vehicle is the total weight of your load, in addition to the weight of the driver and any passengers.
How to calculate your van’s payload
To work out your van’s payload you’ll first need to find out the gross vehicle weight and it’s kerbweight. Both of these numbers can be found on the vehicle’s manual. Gross vehicle weight is the maximum allowable weight of the vehicle, including fuel and oil etc, passengers and cargo. Kerbweight is the nett weight of the vehicle alone.
It’s straightforward to work out the payload – simply subtract your kerbweight from your gross vehicle weight. So, for example a van with a gross vehicle weight of 2600kg has a kerbweight of 2000kg which means it safely carry a payload of 600kg. Don’t forget to include driver and passengers when loading the van – if you loaded 600kg of goods into the van and then had a 78kg passenger and driver your van would be 156kg overweight.
Each van will have a different payload so it’s important you carry out this calculation before loading the van up. As a rough guide see below some payload examples:
Car-derived vans 500kg
Small vans 650-1000kg
Medium vans 800-1600kg
Large vans 1000-1600kg
Pickups 1000-1200kg
So, in summary, it is vitally important you know your van’s payload so, to calculate it you need to subtract the kerbweight of your van from it’s gross vehicle weight.