GVM & the ‘All Rounder’ Ambition

Although useful, a GVM upgrade no longer met Adventuring Pals’ multi-purpose travel needs. Here’s why

After 3 years of full-time travelling around Australia with a caravan, we finally returned home to let the kids start school. 

Being based at a permanent home again, we decided to invest in a family sized Roof Top Tent (RTT). This gave us a chance to explore places in a different way. Without the extra load of the caravan, we were able to explore more remote and hard to reach places such as K’gari (Fraser Island) and the Simpson Desert crossing. We quickly fell in love with the Roof Top Tenting lifestyle and now that we are thinking of hitting the road permanently again, we feel like it would be a great addition to our setup, even with the caravan in tow.

Touring Flexibility

We would use the caravan mainly for most of the travelling, then when the occasion arises, leave it behind and use the RTT to go further and explore more remote and adventurous places. We have done this previously while the kids were younger, but using tents or swags. Now that the kids are a bit bigger, a RTT seems to be a great fit for our family.

The issue we fell into was the old GVM limits and more specifically our rear axle limit. We have already gotten a GVM upgrade on our ute which gives us an extra almost 300kgs of payload. Because of this, we could make our GVM work, however the GVM upgrade did not increase our axle limits with there being no available option to have this done on our model of ute.

Axle Increases 

So after a bit of research on the internet and calling a bunch of companies offering GVM upgrades on other makes of vehicles, we found that there are other utes that have the capability to have the GVM and axle limits increased. After many lengthy discussions, we had decided that even though we have a perfectly fine ute that’s setup with everything one might need to travel Australia, the limitations with the axle limits was enough reason for us to seriously consider upgrading our ute. We decided the sooner the better, giving us a better trade-in deal for another ute that would have the axle limits increased to suit our needs.

Nationally Recognised SSM

A bonus of getting a new vehicle is having the chance to get the GVM upgrade done before the first registration. This means that it can have Federal Approved SSM (Second Stage Manufacturing) and this means that the GVM and axle limits will be recognised nation-wide instead of having to get approval in each state individually. This will only really matter if needing to change registration from one state to another but it’s good to have just in case you want to move states or sell interstate.

No factory options?

One thing I did find whilst researching available vehicles and upgrades, is the big gap in the market for a factory-optioned dual cab ute with heavy duty applications such as what we need in our circumstance. A full truck would be overkill, even inconvenient for city or town life. But a standard dual cab just doesn’t quite hit the spot for the extras required for our families full time travelling.

At least there is plenty of aftermarket support to help solve this problem but it begs to wonder why it’s not available as a factory option.

Elvin Pal runs us through his new Tritan