Planes, trains, and automobiles... can you drive it?

I do not understand the USA licence fully.
So, if I was an average American, as long as I am not being "paid", I can on a normal car drivers licence with no formal training, drive a 18 wheel articulated vehicle....
That doesnt make sense to me.
How can that be legal?..


If you have the mechanical aptitude, working out what does what on any vehicle is probably logical if you think it through.
Not everyone has that ability....
Trying to explain how a Router works to someone who has never used one isnt easy... Router as in the piece of woodworking equipment that has a fast spinning blade to make decorative edges to something there, not a wireless connection device.
But saying that, I know someone who uses Wireless every day but has no idea how to set one up or even switch it off and back on again when it has a fault... they have to ask me....
Actually, thats more than just one person there.
My whole family relies on me for "Technical support"

I think I may be looking at this from the wrong angle.
I learnt to drive a Scammel truck hauling trailers full of Hay around a farm before I was ever allowed on the road, at the age I could reach the pedals.... so thats about 12 yrs old fully trained....
I drove farm tractors before that.

Its in the blood by now I suppose, working out technical things like that is just how I was bought up?...
If it has wheels, I bet I could work it out... just give me a while to play with it so I get familiar with the controls and away I will go.

Well...Except super-fast hyper cars and Formula one.
I refuse to exceed the posted speed limit for any reason these days....
I did all that when I was younger, I dont need that any more.
I will still get a thrill when asked to move an expensive car from one place to another, just sitting in and pressing "Start" is enough of a buzz?.. "I have drove an Aventadore" (If thats even the right spelling", even if its only 100 yds to load and unload, saying I actually drove one, not everyone can say that.
I have driven Old Bentleys. I have driven a Model "T" ford....

Now there is an Idea.
So you think you can drive?... take 20 "I could drive anything" boastful people and give them a model "T" ford, see if they can work out the gear change, without instructions.....

Best done on the Alameda runway base thing they use.. plenty of space to get it wrong.

And yes, it did confuse the [CENSORED] out of me, its just not "Logical", hold a pedal down with your foot against a spring to hold a gear?... why do it that way?...
Let it go, you get High ratio.
Fine, but I am going slow on purpose, if I engage high, its going to stall.
Its kind of like driving holding the clutch in.... as if you were free-wheeling down a hill...
I think I would need time to run through it again before I tried that again.
It didnt sit well in my experiences...

Same here. I've been quizzed often after claiming that I have seemed to have driven every "vehicle with wheels but no wings" category there is. Nobody had come up with something I didn't had the opportunity to work with or just try it out. Of course they ask for F1 cars and the like, but those have "wings"



The Ford model "T" is a bad example. It comes with a manual explaining everything.

When a friend made all driver's license classes there are for his job as vehicle safety expert because in his job he has to drive everything he has to check, I had trained him how to handle trailers and had helped him with his theoretical exams. (I did a test online exam just for fun and had passed with a very good score).
When he had his final practical exam and returned with his "license for everything", I gave him a little present, the manual for a Ford "T". Just because he is supposed to be able to drive anything. Half a year later, a customer had shown up with a model "T" and was amazed that my friend was able to start it and drive it into the shop after just walking around and probing the controls briefly. A model "T" is highly unusual over here!

we end up with traffic jams wherever people need to make their trailer go backwards.

now you're just living in a fantasy world.

The weight limit of the trailer using the common "Plain B" license makes sense. A 500kg trailer is relative easy to turn around by hand so you don't really need to back up your vehicle with trailer.

It makes more sense when you consider that an overweight trailer is much easier to get yourself in trouble with.

Not so long ago I followed a car with a trailer where the wheels were like this:
.----.
|    |
'----'
/----\


When I was close enough, I saw that the trailer was filled with wet sand to the brim. The trailer had no brakes so the legal limit was 750kg (trailer + payload), the car had looked like 500kg (non-braked) and I am very sure that the trailer was meant for 300kg in payload at maximum. But I estimate there were at least ½ m³ wet sand on it, more like 1m³!

1m³ wet sand or gravel is rated 2000kg according to my weight table for crane operators.

I found out that there is a company which makes special trailers for Jeeps:



No, this isn't the result of trying to load the Volvo onto the trailer, this is the result of not more than 1000 yards driving:

The EU drivers license definition isn't about "if it bends". You have your vehicle and then there is the trailer, no matter if it has axles on both ends or just rests on the towing vehicle. C1E entitles you to drive "small rigs" and those bend, too. C1 allows you to drive a vehicle in the so called 7.4 ton class and the "E" allows you to pull a trailer of any kind so you can drive a vehicle with a "saddle" where you attach a semitrailer onto.

What the EU license in general doesn't anticipate is the number of axles. On the mainland (at least France, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and Germany), they include a restriction and limit the amount of axles to "3".
Here is a picture of a license which has the 3-axles limit and the "unlimited weight" exemption:
www.600ccm.info/pages/x_fish/images/130604_02.jpg
The 79(C1E>12000kg,L≤3) is the key here. This means "The owner of this license isn't really entitled for CE but as long as there are not more than 3 axles (L≤3), the CE vehicle is considered as C1E even if it's total weight is more than 12 tons"

The difference between C1E and CE is mainly the total weight and the weight of the towing vehicle, not "if it bends". If you have more than 12 tons, your rig is CE if it "bends" or not.
Of course almost all C1E vehicles "bend" due to the common 3 axle restriction. If the trailer has it's wheel in the middle, it can't handle much payload so you need a semitrailer with its wheel at the rear end to handle a reasonable payload.

It's true that a solid body truck and a 2/3 axle trailer could handle more payload than a semi. The problem is, that this configuration isn't economic any more. This was the standard until the 1980s, but now they use semis. With a semi, the driver doesn't has to wait for loading, just picking up or dropping off the trailer and be on the road while they load. Also the common international cargo container is too long to have two of them on a solid body and a trailer, you need to order an exemption for oversize in half of the EU countries and you need to order this 2..6 weeks in advance. But you can put two onto a long semitrailer, this just barely fits for all EU countries:


The absolute maximum in payload space allowed in most EU countries can be achieved by using 2 trailers, but again, a common solid body truck makes the vehicle too long for most EU countries. That's what those "midget solid bodies" are for:

They are in fact semi trailer tractors converted for full trailers only and some cargo space on top of the "saddle" where a semitrailer would attach. They are then used to pull two trailers at once or a very long semitrailer on a dolly. Almost every bigger Circus uses them. They don't care how long it takes to load or unload their stuff, they need to haul everything in one tour and want as few vehicles as possible because they don't want to hire extra drivers.