Re: legal classification of horse trailers

[Teddy Lancaster <Teddy@runningbear.com>]

You are right...it is a mess.  Try to get insurance on a Freightliner when you
are NOT driving 100,000 or more miles a year and avoid cities like the plague.

I finally went to a commercial insurance company who handles these "mid-size"
trucks and understood.

There is no uniformity and the local.state/federal laws all vary with hardly
any one employee knowing what to do.  I even had one insurance company want to
classify my load as dangerous because it was a "shifting" load (i.e. horses
"shift").  What a joke.  Like a horse will fall on purpose.

Teddy


Glenda R. Snodgrass wrote:

> Teddy, I think your idea about lobbying for change is a great idea.  Part
> of the confusion arises from the fact that vehicles are licensed by
> individual states, with different regs in every state, but interstate
> travel is federally-regulated, so there are conflicts & gaps.  There
> needs to be some universal classification of horse trailers.
>
> When I bought my horse trailer (a small 2H BP) and took the papers down to
> the DMV to get a tag, the clerk didn't know what kind of tag to give me.
> I couldn't get a "farm" tag for it, because I live inside city limits.  He
> asked the woman next to him, and she didn't know, and they got the
> supervisor, and all disappeared in a back office for about 20 minutes,
> then came out with a "trailer" tag, which is normally used for utility
> trailers (like U-Hauls and such), but I didn't want to question it at that
> point.
>
> Re insurance, someone recently posted about horse trailers & contents
> being covered under homeowners -- this is not the case in AL.  In AL, a
> horse trailer is a vehicle, and is insured & regulated as a vehicle.
> Before I bought my trailer, I rented one from a local trailer sales &
> repair shop, with NO insurance.  I called my insuror, to see whether the
> policy on my truck would cover a trailer I was towing, and was told NO.
> My liability would cover 3rd party damage if the trailer came unhitched
> and ran into another car or fence or something, but my insurance would
> not cover damages to the trailer itself.  There's no way in this state to
> have insurance coverage on a trailer that is not your own, even
> temporarily when borrowing or renting.  A strange mish-mash of laws.
>
> Glenda & Lakota
> Mobile, AL