Quite often we meet organisations that have heavy vehicles but don’t see themselves as transport operators or part of the transport industry. Often for them the realisation that the Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) applies to them does not come until they are fined at the roadside or an incident occurs and they are asked to produce records that they did not understand they were required to keep.

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The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) also recognised the issue and released  Regulatory Advice for people who own or manage businesses that are not primarily heavy vehicle transport focused, but use heavy vehicles to transport people, building material, tools, small plant or construction equipment to and from work sites (link).

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The only thing not really covered in the above advice is understanding of heavy vehicle mass limits - one of the Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) principal obligations we are automating compliance for.

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Heavy vehicles are not cars

If you were asked what is the maximum load of your car - where would you look?

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• Compliance plate on the vehicle?
• Registration papers?
• Online rego check?

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Any of these will show the GVM (Gross Vehicle Mass) as the maximum your vehicle can weigh when fully loaded as recommended by the manufacturer. Fundamentally, if you are below this mass then it should be safe and legal to drive the vehicle on the road.

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What if you were asked the same thing for a heavy vehicle (over 4.5 tonnes GVM)?

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The GVM will still be shown for the heavy vehicle as the maximum the vehicle can weigh when fully loaded however, this is not necessarily the same as the legally allowable mass limit for that vehicle when on the road network.

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Note: You must load to whichever is lower the Engineered GVM (shown on the compliance plate and in rego papers) or the Allowable Mass Limit.

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How easy is mass to get wrong?

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Some of the things we have seen recently would be obvious to a transport manager but not so obvious to others for example:

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Scenario 1: A business wanted a vehicle set up in another business's systems and sent a screenshot from an online registration check to demonstrate the masses for the vehicle.

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Issue: The GVM for the vehicle was over 17 tonnes, unfortunately the allowable mass limit for the vehicle is only 15 tonnes. Guess how often they overload this vehicle?

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Scenario 2: A manufacturing business that also operates 30+ trucks had in their safety management system mass operating procedure to load to the GVM on the compliance plate.

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Issue: The GVMs for some of these larger trucks were over 26 tonnes but the allowable mass limit was only 22.5 tonnes.

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It's not just the confusion between GVMs and allowable masses

We have also seen recently where vehicles are moved from one jurisdiction to another and the allowable masses or conditions are very different but no one in the administration team picks up the mistake, for example:

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Scenario: Moving a Higher Mass Limit (HML) semi trailer from Victoria to New South Wales

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Issue: The requirements for HML in Victoria (Road Friendly Suspension) are not the same in New South Wales and Queensland (Intelligent Access Program or Telematics Monitoring Application) without meeting the monitoring requirement the vehicle could be 3 tonnes overloaded.

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Scenario: Moving a truck and 3 axle dog from New South Wales to Victoria

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Issue: Truck and 3 Axle dog limits are not the same in NSW (48 tonnes) as the rest of the States (45 tonnes) so again the combination could be 3 tonnes overloaded - same vehicle just a different State

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Where can I find out the allowable mass limits?

This is where it starts to get tricky and people can get caught in confusion. A good place to start is the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator’s (NHVR) General Mass and Dimension Limits page (link) as a high level guide. Transport for NSW also has a mass limits chart (link) that is very helpful. Charts from the other jurisdictions are very difficult to find.

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Unfortunately, using the NHVR and State based information as a guide is not always enough. Because heavy vehicles are not cars there are so many factors to take into consideration from registration charges and axle spacing down to tyre count and their sizes.  

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This is why we built it into the Unavin Software Platform, simplified and automated compliance: Speeding, Fatigue, Masses (coming soon) and Maintenance (later this year).

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