The “B” category allows people to drive trucks with a GVW of up to 3500kgs. The gross vehicle weight is the combined body weight of the truck chassis, body and payload.

 For you, the truck rental customer it is very important that you specify to the truck rental company exactly what you are carrying. Quite often when we are dealing with truck hire enquiries on the phone and we start asking questions about what the customer is carrying, people can feel that we are being a little intrusive. When one of our truck rental representatives is asking about what you need to move, he is trying to ascertain what exact weight and volume that is required to be moved.

Also, you may find the truck rental representative asking you about how the distance between your houses if you are a house mover or the number of drops and runs if you are a courier company. This is so we can tell of you are in a position to do multiple runs if you have a high payload requirement and are operating on a car license.

It is not uncommon for a truck hire customer to arrive for a vehicle collection and mention in passing that he has six pallets of tiles that need to be transported from Dublin to Cork. Our reaction is usually a vehicle upgrade to a “C” class rental truck that can carry 4000kgs rather than a 1000kgs car licence tail lift truck.

When we get back to the GVW of the small hire trucks and the car licence user, we know what legal payload the truck can carry. Our light hire trucks are designed to be as light as possible within the constraints of construction. The real difficulty for the house mover or Transport Company is to figure out their payload requirement. The example of the tiles from above illustrates such a case. Each pallet of tiles would weight 750kgs and so a payload of 4500kgs is required. This would really overload the small hire truck and could possibly lead to a prosecution if the operator was stopped at a weigh bridge.  Our responsibility is to the truck rental customer. We want the customer to select the correct truck for what they require to carry.

It is common for a truck rental enquiry to be based solely on price with little regard for anything else. We take an active interest in our trucks and the applications they are used for. The reasoning for this is quite simple. We do not want our customers to be prosecuted for operating outside of the current road transport legislation and we will not knowingly give out a vehicle which is not fit for the purpose for which it is hired for. This policy is in place to keep the truck rental customer safe and legal and also for the benefit of other road users.

There is no tachograph requirement on light trucks below 3500kgs. If a vehicle contains a tachograph, your car license does not entitle you to drive it.

It is not a current requirement to fit a speed limiter to these vehicles. That said they should not be driven in the same manner as a car. We would recommend all our truck hire customers to maintain a speed not exceeding 100 Kph.

Basically, you will find that running on a car license does limit your options. Typically house movers who rent a truck require volume rather than payload. This is because household moves of furniture and beds etc are not  very heavy but do take up quite a bit of space.

Many business user rent trucks to do specific jobs that often involve heavy loads. We can provide hire trucks that have a small footprint and a large carrying capacity.