The Three Weights

Three Numbers That Describe Every Vehicle

Any vehicle's weight story is told in three numbers:

• Unladen weight (also called kerb or service weight) — what the vehicle weighs empty: the vehicle itself, ready to drive, with no cargo and no passengers beyond the driver. A fixed property of the vehicle.
• Payload (maximum load) — the most weight the vehicle is designed and permitted to carry: cargo plus passengers plus fuel plus anything else added. The working capacity.
• Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW) — the maximum total the vehicle may weigh, fully loaded. The absolute ceiling.

They relate by one equation you never need to look up:

GVW = unladen weight + payload
…which rearranges to the number you actually care about:
Payload = GVW − unladen weight

That rearrangement is the whole practical point of this lesson: your legal carrying capacity isn't a number someone tells you — it's a subtraction you can do yourself, from two numbers on your logbook. Everything else in Module 7 is about respecting the answer.

Quick check: Q: A pickup has a GVW of 2,800 kg and an unladen weight of 1,900 kg. What's its legal payload? A: 2,800 − 1,900 = 900 kg — that's the total for cargo, passengers, and anything else added, not cargo alone.

Reading Them Off the Logbook

This isn't abstract — the numbers live on the logbook (Lesson 5.7), the document that also proves ownership. Kenyan logbooks record the vehicle's tare/unladen weight and its Gross Vehicle Weight among the registered particulars. With those two, the payload subtraction from 7.1.1 is immediate.

Two habits this builds:

• Know your own numbers. A driver who can't state their vehicle's GVW and payload is guessing at every load — and guessing high is how overloading happens without anyone deciding to overload.
• The logbook is the authority, not the seller or the sticker. "It'll handle a tonne easily" is a sales claim; the GVW on the logbook is the legal fact. Where they disagree, the logbook wins.

Note the connection back to Lesson 5.1: Category B is defined by a GVW not exceeding 3,500 kg. So GVW isn't only a load number — it's also what decides which licence category your vehicle sits in. One figure, two consequences.

The Number That Runs Kenyan Load Law: 3,500 kg

One figure recurs across Kenyan and East African load regulation: 3,500 kg. Under the East African Community Vehicle Load Control Act 2016, every vehicle with a GVW exceeding 3,500 kg must be weighed at a weighbridge — and evading, bypassing, or absconding from a weighing station is itself an offence (Lesson 7.4).

That threshold does double duty, which is why it's worth memorising as the load-law number:

• Below 3,500 kg GVW → light-vehicle territory (Category B), no mandatory weighbridge.
• Above 3,500 kg GVW → commercial load-control territory: mandatory weighing, axle limits, the EAC Act's enforcement machinery.

It's the same 3,500 kg that bounds Category B in Lesson 5.1 — the licensing system and the load-control system share the line, because the same threshold that changes what you may drive changes what you must comply with when loaded.

Quick check: Q: Why does a driver need to know whether their loaded vehicle's GVW crosses 3,500 kg? A: Because 3,500 kg is the threshold above which weighing at a weighbridge is mandatory under the EAC Vehicle Load Control Act — and it's the same line that separates Category B from commercial licence categories.

Two Ways to Be Overloaded

A subtle but crucial point that catches even careful operators: there are two independent weight limits, and you can breach one while legal on the other.

1. Gross Vehicle Weight — the total, as above. Exceed your GVW and you're overloaded, full stop.
2. Axle weight — the load carried by each individual axle. Regulations cap the weight per axle (commonly 8 tonnes per axle in the EAC framework), separately from the total.

Here's the trap: a truck can be within its total GVW yet illegal on a single axle, because the load is distributed badly — piled toward the front or rear rather than spread. Kenyan enforcement explicitly checks both: a vehicle must fall within the maximum gross weight and have no single axle over the limit. This is why "I'm under my total weight" is not a complete defense, and why distribution (Lesson 7.3) is a safety and legal issue in its own right, not just a tidiness preference.

The takeaway for now: the three weights of this lesson describe the whole vehicle, but the law also cares where on the vehicle the weight sits. Both matter, independently.