Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
Yeah. As in a 6,000 pound pick up truck. Saving 30 pounds is crucial.
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Probably not crucial, but it does add up after a while. Remember that GVWR & GCWR comes into play far more regularly on a pickup as well. Doing a few things to save a couple hundred pounds on your tow vehicle and trailer can mean several hundred more pounds of payload when towing, and several hundred less pounds to speed up/slow down the rest of the time.
Is it worth dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars into shaving a few pounds? Of course not, the payback might take a million miles. Is it worth swapping heavier parts in need of repair/replacement for lighter/stronger ones? Yes, pretty much every time.
For example: We pull a gooseneck 14' dump trailer full of gravel pretty regularly. It has a 14,000 gvwr. There are many tow vehicles that are rated to pull this much weight, but frequently this would exceed the GCWR of the tow vehicle because of how it is equipped from the factory. This is much, much more common than what people would expect. Any weight savings from the vehicle (while maintaining braking/steering/etc ability) effectively gives you the ability to pull a larger trailer without exceeding the GCWR. This can also mean fewer trips and make more $$$$ per trip.
Some people don't care about these ratings, and many of the vehicles you see going down the road are grossly over loaded. The place that we get our gravel from weighs us when we go in, and will not load the trailer to its capacity if they know they are going to grossly exceed your gcwr or rear axle rating (they are pretty anal as they have state contracts...but cheapest place around). So in this scenario, or any scenario where you are hauling/towing you can see that shaving weight is important.
It also takes a lot more fuel to get a 7000+lb vehicle up to speed, and much more braking to slow it down. All of this is wasted fuel. At speed, on level ground I agree that it probably doesn't account to much in fuel usage though.