Helping your parents choose a caravan
Check the weights, run the towing numbers, send back a list they can act on
Your parents already know the layout they want and how they plan to travel.
The part you can do from a laptop is the arithmetic on the published weights and their car's towing limits.
Three people choose plenty of caravans. Two of them will tow it. The third is the son or daughter who took the call asking them to look online. The pages below are for that son or daughter.
Your parents have probably walked through more vans than you have. They know the layout they want and how they plan to travel. None of that is your job to second-guess.
Your job is the spreadsheet part: checking the numbers, lining the options up side by side, and sending back something they can act on. All of it can be done from here, and none of it costs anything.
How to sanity-check their shortlist
Every spec on our van pages comes from what the manufacturer or its dealers publish. Where a tow check has to estimate a figure, such as a towball limit, the page says so.
For each van on their list, the figures worth writing down are the ATM (the most the loaded van may weigh), the tare (its empty weight), the ball weight, and the starting price. The gap between tare and ATM is the payload, which is everything they get to pack: water, gas, bedding, chairs, the lot.
If a price says POA
POA means price on application. That van is priced to the spec the buyer chooses, so there is no single sticker number to show you. The way to get a real figure is to take the spec list to a dealer and ask. It is a common way of pricing a van built to order.
Published figures are for comparison. Before anyone signs, the weights get confirmed against the van's own compliance plate and the manufacturer's paperwork. Our compliance plate guide shows where every figure is stamped and what each one means.
The towing traps to check before anything else
The most useful thing you can do from a laptop three suburbs away is the towing arithmetic. It is the part that rules vans in or out, and the part that is easiest to gloss over in a showroom on a Saturday. Three checks do the work.
- The van's ATM against the car's braked towing capacity. The car has to be rated to pull the van at its maximum loaded weight, not at the empty weight in the brochure. Nobody tows an empty van.
- Ball weight against the car's payload. The weight the van presses down on the towbar counts against the car's carrying capacity, alongside your parents and everything they pack in the boot. A car can be rated to tow the van and still have nothing left for the people in it.
- The GCM, across both. The legal cap on the loaded car and the loaded van together. A pairing can pass the first two checks and still fail this one, which is why it gets checked and not assumed.
The car's side of those numbers is in its owner's manual. If the terms are new to you, caravan weights explained covers the lot in plain English.
Run the check in a few minutes
Put the car's figures and a van's published weights into the tow calculator and it shows the margins on every check above. Or start from the car: caravans for your car lists the vans that fit inside a given model's published figures, and Can I Tow? checks a specific car against a specific van.
Open the tow calculatorPut the finalists side by side
Once the list is down to a few, stop reading pages one at a time. Every van page has a "Compare side-by-side" link, or you can pick vans straight from the compare page, up to four at once.
The comparison lives in the page address. Copy the link out of the address bar, send it, and whoever opens it sees the same vans side by side.
There are also ready-made head-to-heads for common rivalries at all comparisons, where the verdicts come from published figures only.
What to hand back
A good report back is short. The two or three vans that survived the checks, whether their car tows each one with room to spare, and the questions still open: the POA price, the delivery time, what the warranty covers.
From there it is their decision, which is how it should be. If they want the long version of any of it, the start-to-finish buying guide is written for them.
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