SALT LAKE CITY — Monday, just a day before the bright lights of reality hit any new creation in the RV industry during the RVX show, Keystone RV Co. found out it and its partners MORryde, Dexter Axle and ASA Electronics had received a patent for new technology designed to help RVers keep from overloading a towed vehicle.
LoadSafe places sensors in the axles and tongue of towables. Through the iN.Command system, LoadSafe is able to have access to the gross vehicle weight rating of the Keystone trailer. The system weighs both the tongue weight – to see if the trailer weight is correctly balanced – and the the weight of the contents. Adding those two totals together and subtracting them from the GVWR lets the driver know if it is safe to tow the trailer or if some of the contents need to be removed.
When a trailer is overloaded, the LoadSafe display turns from green to red and shows the amount of weight that the trailer is beyond the GVWR.
LoadSafe has been in the works for four years, according to Keystone CEO Matt Zimmerman.
“The system tells the RVer, ‘You have too much weight to travel down the road safely. You need to take some of that cargo out,’” said Senior VP of Engineering Mark Bullock. “That’s something that customers today has no other way of knowing. When you load up in your driveway, you go, right? Most people don’t take it to a gravel pit and have it weighed. With this technology here, we can show you that, right here, guess what, you have 600 pounds too much in this trailer.”
A similar display lets the driver know if the weight is loaded too far back in the trailer, resulting in too much weight being taken off the hitch pin.
“It is a really cool design that brings safety to the end user,” Zimmerman said. “There’s no more guess work in loading your RV.”
For now, LoadSafe is approved as a concept. The next step is for Keystone to work toward commercialization. LoadSafe is not planned for any 2019 models, but Bullock said he is hoping to perhaps have it in use for 2020 models.