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OK, Sue and I sat down to watch the latest Caravan Channel (episode 41) last night and Phil Widdows informed us at the top of the programme that there would be some caravanning “pre-flight” safety checks. Now hearing “pre-flight” always gets my attention, so I settled in for some helpful safety tips.
We were introduced to Paul Stapleton of the Motor Caravan Engineers Association (MCEA) “who would take us through some simple, but very effective ‘pre-flight’ checks that every caravanner should undertake before a journey“
Watch the segment here: http://caravanchannel.co.uk/videos?vid=373
The first part was OK, all about checking the torque settings on wheel bolts, he then moved inside. Again all good stuff… cupboard doors shut, cooker lid down etc…. hang on – no mention of checking your roof lights? No mention of checking all the windows all shut properly? No mention of one of the most commonly forgotten items…. checking your TV aerial is down and pointing in the right direction? I suppose a quick comical reminder about making sure the catch of the fridge door was applied to stop your beer rolling about would be a bit too much. Maybe it’s down to the editing of the segment to fit into the programme schedule, maybe they need to talk about more important things, I’ll hang on in and see what’s next!
We moved on to hitching up. Top marks for informing us to switch off the ignition before coupling up the electric’s…. but wait a minute, shouldn’t he have gone through making sure the hitch was securely on the tow ball – showing us the checking of the hitch indicator and making doubly sure by winding the jockey wheel back down a little to test that it is a positive connection BEFORE telling us about the electric’s?
Hmmm…. and while we are on about the electric’s… he’s just said that turning off the ignition makes sure there is nothing live…. but what about pin 9 on the 13 Pin plug we were shown being connected – surly that always live? Also what about mentioning if you have a certain manufacturers brake stability system fitted to check the status of the indicator light at this point?
Moving on…. we never got to see the application of the lever that applies the pressure to the friction pads on the hitch stabiliser nor a quick mention on checking the wear indicators…. but for me the biggest and most unforgivable sin was absolutely no mention what so ever of the correct coupling and use of the safety breakaway cable! Finishing up, there could have been the gentle reminder when he released the hand brake also to check jockey wheel was raised and secured as well.
Was it the MCEA’s fault because they didn’t cover these things? Well if it was, it doesn’t show their organisation in a very good light. Was it due to the editing of the programme segment? Again, it doesn’t show the programme makers in very good light as really it should have been checked during editing especially as it’s a programme about caravanning!
OK… so is it me? Or did they miss a bit……?
Thanks for reading
S
Caravan Chronicles 
Hi Paul
Thanks again for taking the time to respond. I’m glad to hear that you are busy, especially in these economic times.
I don’t necessarily agree with you that the first opportunity to educate the customers is the dealer. The prime educator should be the trade associations, publications, the two major clubs, TV and internet. The dealer is usually one of the last stops in the chain before a new caravanner takes to the road. Not may people get up one morning and say “we will go and buy a caravan this morning” most I would imagine do some research before going to a dealer.
Forums in the main are a wonderful thing, and there are some good ordinary people that devote a lot of free time to ensuring that information and help for new caravanners is available, indeed, some of your fellow engineers contribute greatly to them. However there are drawbacks in so far as some of the information is lost to newcomers in the melee that is forum discussion.
One of the reasons I started this blog was the fact that some of the information I was reading was either conflicting or of dubious value. I looked to magazines, the clubs, industry bodies and TV for information as well as the internet. I never went to a dealer though, as I suspected the information might be as biased as a used car salesperson’s patter. With hindsight, my dealer – Glossop Caravans, they were actually quite good and the information we received was it turns out, spot on.
I cannot comment on the funding of the MCEA and if it has the resources to promote education within the industry, but as an independent organisation of self employed caravan engineers, I think that one of the key objectives should be to promote yourself, promote the talents of fellow engineers and promote the organisation. It is short sighted not to use those talents to help educate new caravanners and possibly re-educate existing caravanners, after all where does your next customer come from and maybe the next person you help educate might be your next customer.
Yes, people like me do come along and challenge things, and newcomers also challenge others as they haven’t the ‘restrictions’ placed on them by “it’s always been done this way” thinking. We see things differently, that someone who may have been in the industry a while cannot see even though they are staring right at it. Sometimes it is a long road of discussion and “ping pong” as you put it, but just sometimes it’s worth it.
It’s a pity that you regret your appearance, I thought it was a useful medium to promote yourself and especially the MCEA and it’s engineers to potential new customers.
As you say, your time is constrained, so we will leave it at that then.
S
You make some good points but unfortunately I am too overwhelmed with work to take the time now to engage you on the subjects as deeply as I would like to.
However, the first opportunity to educate the new caravaner is at the dealership, not the internet or a marginal TV show that most caravaners don’t even know about. Sadly the dealer is often the source of some gross misinformation. Often the dealer has little knowledge of “caravanning” and its challenges. Time and time again we undertake a 1st year service on a caravan and educate the owner on how to use it and time and time again we hear, no one told me about that etc.
Unfortunately we, MCEA, do not sell the caravans and those that do often present a caravan as a 5 star hotel on wheels that is capable of amazing things.such as instant blown air heating and awning heaters.
I am currently trying to assist an owner who spent £22k on a caravan and the ” house hold name” dealer sold a load of other kit to go with it weighing over 300kg but failed to tell him the him the caravan had a user payload of only 176 kg. by time he put bedding, a BBQ and a few other perfectly reasonable bits in the caravan it was overloaded by 260kg and now he has a relaxed suspension and a dangerous to tow caravan. And to cap it all the same dealer is wanting £1200 to replace the axle as technically the customer over loaded the caravan. I have been hearing this type of thing for years. You could argue for a claim under SOGA but what will happen as is always the case is a deal will be done and the customer will just be relieved to get something sorted.
As caravans become more complex then the need to tutor the owner in getting the best out of it and safely increases. We can not do it for nothing and we are trying to make a living in a very competitive service sector which has no slush fund. Consumers will not pay to be told how their caravan works. Many begrudge paying for a service and only do so to comply with warranty and would happily pay a back hander for a stamp in the book with no service. Most caravaners are not Sherry and cheese nibbles, they are a pie and a pint and consider caravanning to be posh tenting and do not stop to think about carbon monoxide testing for room sealed appliances and about how expensive the kit to do this is and the labour time involved in doing this let alone the training costs involved in competency tickets for this and much more.
Neither am I the TV company or a magazine editor so I have no influence there either
Where we, the MCEA, do score is that we are not only well trained engineers, we are independent business’s who sink or swim by doing a good job or not. we are nearly all caravanners also and that means we have also had the problems and issues that every caravanner has rangeing from bad service to miss selling to having to tell a wife and two kids that their holiday is over after one day as the caravan is faulty and the dealer simply says bring it back in 4 weeks time and we will have a look.
Although improving, historically the industry is poorly trained, the persons working in it are transitional and poorly paid with no interest or passion for it. Whilst the customer is nearly always passionate about it as it is his leisure activity. Just about everyone at a car garage will own and drive a car whilst very few people working in the a caravan garage / dealer would own or use a caravan. The sales men are chasing figures and the technicians are timed. And the owners are in business.
Winding up the jockey wheel when hitched has pros and cons but for reasons of professional indemnity I and any other professional would be foolish to comment.As with much what you see on the internet it is only someones opinion and often just hearsay. Once engaged professionally in the industry one needs to be very careful in any advice we give and that is why people like me are reluctant to address questions on many forums and blogs. Often people like you come along and challenge and before you know it we are down a wrong road of time consuming keyboard ping pong. I regret putting my head above the parapet for the TV now and as I say I would love to engage you further but time restraints are a constant.
Simon, I believe you have demonstrated a lack of depth of thought in your comments. (In my opinion) a man of your particular media background should understand how limiting 4 minutes of TV is and how difficult technical points are to capture in any media. I would be the first to admit my TV work is of an amateur quality but I do take umbrage with the inference that my caravan credentials are amateur. No one should underestimate how much time and effort goes in to producing 4 minutes of TV. My time, workshops and other resources were given in goodwill in an attempt to raise the profile of the not so obvious safety checks that many caravanners are not aware of and that lead to road accidents and damaged caravans, the results of which we in the repair side of things see all too often. All of which could be avoided.
Earlier this year I commissioned a survey of several thousand MCEA customers across the UK asking a range of safety questions. From the cross section questioned I can reveal the following:
99.7 % knew what a safety breakaway cable is
0.93% own a torque wrench
2.27% checked their tyre pressures on the caravan before a journey
I take safety more seriously than my TV career therefore I am not going to spend my 4 minutes telling experienced caravanners that they need to connect the breakaway cable. Put In more simple terms, I was not going to go on TV and teach your granny how to suck eggs so I did not state the obvious.
We had 4 minutes to get over some good points. I very much hope that some of the viewers have now invested in a torque wrench, now know how to use it and there will now be a few less wheel detachments as a result.
Was it an amateur performance? Definitely yes, it was my debut and I was absolutely bricking it.
Would I do it again? Probably not now.
Do I care about the production issue of a specialist interest TV show on an obscure TV channel? I understand how marginal the show is and what its limits are and therefore I have always been careful not to be over critical of it. It is what it is and Spielberg it is not.
Paul Stapleton,
MCEA.
Hi Paul
Thanks for posting back on this, I thought that maybe the program makers would have responded, but I’m pleased you have replied.
I fully understand that 4 minutes is a limited time to explain anything and it was going to be a difficult task to even try, as I said above “a check list would be a long list indeed”.
However, I never said it was amateurish, what I said was “It doesn’t show the organisation in a very good light.” That was not down to presentation skills or your organisation, but down to the content and the way in which it was edited. That is one reason why my email was despatched off to the program makers and not the MCEA.
I realise that my blog has obviously been talked about on your MCEA Forum as I can see the traffic directed from it, but as that is a closed forum, I can’t comment back on there.
I cannot dispute your figures quoted, but on the subject of breakaway cables, yes 99.7% may know what a safety cable is, but maybe a follow up question should have been “do you know how to correctly attach your safety cable?”
If you look at one of the recent threads about this on Caravan Talk (one of the biggest UK caravan forums with over 26,000 members) there was a thread about where to attach a break-away cable – the thread actually started after a police warning to a member about an incorrectly attached safety cable. The thread totaled over 20 pages and some 385 posts ( http://www.caravantalk.co.uk/community/topic/70257-warning-to-caravan-owners/page__hl__%20brakeaway%20%20cable)
So although 99.7% of the people you asked if they knew what a breakaway cable was, possibly an awful lot of them if pressed, would be unsure how it should be correctly connected and maybe a lot of experienced caravanners could have learnt something. As you say, safety is your main concern, not your TV career…. but maybe going back on TV and clearing up the safety cable confusion would be to the benefit of both.
After the recent issue with detached wheels, I am a little surprised that only 0.93 or less that 1 in 100 caravanners owned a torque wrench. Again, a little research on Caravan Talk, and the other forums would indicate that maybe this number has grown somewhat and is continuing to grow… especially the number of requests for people to confirm torque settings and asking if there is a different torque setting for steel and alloy wheels. I did comment that the torque settings coverage “was all good stuff”.
However, I did speak on line recently to one of your engineers and he reckoned that about one third of his customers had torque wrenches…. as they were all owners of a particular make of van, so I was wondering if your figures were recent?
As a relative new caravanner myself of just over 12 months, I have seen virtually on every trip out with our caravan, one on the opposite side of the motorway with a roof light open or TV aerial up. One thing I constantly tell myself…. it’s not “if” I leave a roof light open or TV aerial up… it’s “when”. Even the Caravan Club magazine recently had a wonderful still shot of a car and caravan traveling along a road as the main spread in a feature…. and the TV aerial was up (and there were no extended mirrors on the tow car, but that is as they say, another story) So maybe we all need a little light hearted reminder now and again. Funnily enough in another program there was a feature on what to do if your roof light was broken and how to make a temporary repair.
I understand your organisation takes safety very importantly, and I would not wish to imply any differently, and I think that having segments from professionals in the program are a very worth while inclusion, but while the majority of it’s viewers have been caravanning for many years….there are people like my wife and I who started watching it a few months before we bought our caravan… so there must be a significant minority of others out their that are watching and thinking about their first caravan.
There was another thread on a popular forum that started by someone asking when hitching did everyone wind the jockey-wheel down again to ‘test’ that the hitch was secure and locked on as they had never heard of this…. I was surprised that caravanners of several years experience said it was not required as there were red and green tabs on the coupling to tell you. So maybe inclusion might have been worth while. And yes… someone has asked about the difference between the red handbrake lever and the black handbrake lever.
30 years ago, if you wanted a caravan, you bought a magazine, chatted to Bob at work who had been caravanning for years, eventually buy a van and maybe Bob and his wife would come over one evening and go through setting up your van over a small sherry and cheesy nibbles, and I guess this had been going on for generations.
Now we have the internet, and unfortunately it is full of information that is, as I suspect you already know, not always sound information. The trend to day is to do your research on the internet, ask a few questions on a forum maybe and eventually set off with a newly purchased van in tow, sometimes with little or no knowledge of hitch weights, load balancing – and as you say, not even checking tyre pressures.
I suspect, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this, that MCEA engineers tend to only come into contact with people that already own a caravan and never have chance to talk to someone thinking of buying a van. Maybe, that is where the MCEA can come into it’s own. A series of 2 or 3 minute guides from your friendly MCEA engineer for the new caravanner, everything from hitching up to pitching up. Put them on TV, put them on your web site, I’ll shout loudly from here that they are available.
S
Well 18 days later, I’ve had no reply from anyone at the programme, so I guess it wasn’t all that important!
S
I’ve flirted an email off to the programme maker/producer (well who ever is behind “contact us” on the web site) and raised a couple of the more serious points… like the break away cable. I also attached a link to my posting, so they can pick up on a few of the other things.
I’ll let you know if there is any response back.
S
I think you are being a bit harsh Simon! They never said they were going to list ALL the checks, just some of them!
Hi Kev
Your right, a list off all the checks would be a long list indeed, but if you had limited time in a segment, cupboard doors and glass cooker covers are not essential safety items, checking the hitch is secure and breakaway cable is correctly fastened would be a bit more prudent I would have thought.
S
Hi Simon,
I too saw this programme and was quite shocked by the amateurish way it covered this most important of topics. Like you I spotted the obvious omissions and wondered how they came to rate them in order of importance, or did they just pick random items to fit the time alloted? If they were constrained by time, perhaps a link to their website with a full list published there would have been a good idea.
John
PS And their review of the Sprite was disgraceful. For years the caravan media go on about there being no entry-level low-weight vans … so Swift build the Sprite Lite, and all he can do is list “it hasn’t got this and it hasn’t got that” and “I don’t like the curtains” !!