Thread: Trailer Death

Absent-mindedness when attaching? - a terrible result

Raises liability issues? Trailer is only covered when "attached"? AFIK

A friend of mine had his vehicle written off, and ended up in hospital when a trailer detached from a vehicle from the opposite direction to which he was travelling. The reciever hitch came out on that one and the strange thing was it occured on a bend, the vehicle and trailer had already been travelling for the past 2 hrs, and they were the only two vehicles on the road at the point of accident. My friend was not hurt bad and recoverd quicky.

This is something I actually emailed Vicroads about maybe twelve months back. Namely the quality of shackles and clips being used reguarly on supposed "Safety Chains" by people towing trailers ect.
Vicroads never responded to my email.
One morning on my way home from a nightshift I witnessed a trailer detach from the towing vehicle towing it!
I knew the owner/driver so went over to assist. There was only one safety chain on the trailer and it was or had been held on to the vehicle with one of those cheap springy carrabineer type hooks. When the trailer uncouple it sped up and puctured the rear right tyre of the towing vehicle, then careered accross to the adjoining carriageway and proceded on for another 100 or so metres before coming to a halt on the roadside. Any pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists coming towards it would have been cactus. This same motorist often tows horse floats! This all happened in a 60 Kmh zone...immagine what it would do in a 110 kmh zone.

Cheers, Mick.

NSW has No rego reinspecs for unbraked trailers and they do not as a rule get any maintenance.

It takes an unfortunate event such as this to change things

But, incompetence and oversights will still occur

The drawbar could have come off the vehicle-safety chains won't do anything then...

Originally Posted by 87County

NSW has No rego reinspecs for unbraked trailers and they do not as a rule get any maintenance.

It takes an unfortunate event such as this to change things

But, incompetence and oversights will still occur

Rego inspections are not required for any private cars in, for example, Victoria. There is no significant difference in the accident rate between the two states (other differences that make no visible difference include the zero tolerance in speeding in Victoria and the graduated speed limits for L & P in NSW).

Since almost all of this type of accident is caused by errors in attaching the trailer (and they are pretty rare anyway), it is not clear what you expect an annual inspection to achieve.

John

Landcruiser. Some details here: 'Freak accident': runaway trailer kills elderly man

Cheers
KarlB

Originally Posted by isuzutoo-eh

The drawbar could have come off the vehicle-safety chains won't do anything then...

Or the A-frame could have come off the trailer (I have actually seen that happen!) but the probability of either has to be extremely low - I would be very surprised if this did not turn out to be an incorrectly attached trailer plus a safety chain either not attached or insecurely attached.

There are all sorts of other possible scenarios, but they are all very, very, improbable. There are very few of this sort of accident, but the prevention of 99.9% of them is very easy, as I pointed out in my first post.

John