Date:         Thu, 24 Feb 2000 12:57:04 -0500
Reply-To:     David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Subject:      Re: trailer hitches
Comments: To: Per Lindgren <lindgre@ONLINE.NO>
In-Reply-To:  <38B52AE1.ED7D8081@online.no>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

At 07:58 AM 2/24/2000 , Per Lindgren wrote:
>When did they say that? I have never seen this! On the other hand, my
>instruction manual has info on trailer weights, their web site has the same
>thing too!

As I recall your manual has all sorts of useful info about driving in the
rough, too, where the US manual says to the effect of "remember, it's not
really an off-road vehicle."  Welcome to America, where you are assumed
(maybe correctly) to have no judgment, and are forbidden to hurt yourself,
and if by any awful chance you *do* hurt yourself it is guaranteed to be
someone else's fault and you can go into partnership with a lawyer who will
collect a bunch of someones and work very hard to make one or all  of them
cough up a bunch of money.  The lawyer takes the risk of loss, and in
return gets to keep maybe a third of the award.

Companies that make the stuff you got hurt using are natural targets
(sometimes correctly, of course), and they tend to go to ridiculous
extremes of warnings etc.  As one example, for some time the U-Haul (truck
and trailer rental) Company had a policy that nobody but their agents
should mount or dismount one of their trailers to your hitch (either the
company or the agents seem to have seen the light, as I haven't heard about
this the last couple times I rented).

david
David Beierl - Providence, RI
  http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"