Your garage

Before loadmate can tell you anything useful about your towing safety, it needs to know what you tow with and what you tow. Every weight limit, every load you place, every warning about being over the mark, and the safety score itself are all worked out from the details of your own vehicle and your own caravan. Get those set up once, and the rest of the app has solid ground to stand on. Your garage is where that setup lives. It is the home for every tow vehicle and every caravan you own, and the place you come back to whenever you want to check one, edit it, or switch which pair you are travelling with. This page explains what the garage holds, how to add your first asset, and how to choose and hitch the rig you are using today.

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Why the garage is the foundation

Think of the garage as the filing cabinet for your rig. Each vehicle and each caravan is a record, and loadmate reads from those records constantly. The limit your vehicle is allowed to weigh fully loaded, the laden limit of your caravan, where your storage zones sit, your tyre details, your service history, your warranty dates — all of it hangs off the asset you set up here. This is also why setting things up carefully pays off. A wrong or missing baseline weight, for example, throws off every calculation that follows it. The garage does not do the safety maths itself; it holds the facts that the safety maths depends on. Spend the few minutes here, and everything downstream becomes trustworthy.

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When your garage is empty

The very first time you open the garage, there is nothing in it yet, and loadmate shows you that plainly rather than dropping you into a blank screen. You see a short headline, Your garage is empty, a line explaining that adding your first vehicle is how you get started with towing safety, and one clear button: Add your first vehicle. The faint, greyed-out shapes above the headline are a preview of what the garage will look like once it has assets in it — a hint of the layout to come, not real records. Start with your tow vehicle. Once it is in, loadmate will guide you on to adding a caravan.

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The asset list and what each card shows

Once you have more than one asset, the garage shows them as a scrollable list, grouped into Vehicles and Trailers so the two halves of your rig stay clearly separated. Your most recently used asset sits at the top of each group. Each asset appears as a card. The card leads with the name you will recognise — the nickname you gave it, if you set one, or its make and model if you did not. Below the name sits a short line of detail: the registration number and the current odometer reading, where you have entered them. If a card is the one you are currently travelling with, it carries a small Active badge on the right; the others show a chevron instead, telling you to tap through to open them. Tapping a card opens that asset’s full profile, where you edit its details and check its health. A long-press on one of your own assets opens the archive and delete controls, for when you sell or retire a rig. (A long-press on the demo rig does nothing — it is immutable.)

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Sorting the list with the filter chips

Above the list sit four filter chips, so a fuller garage stays easy to scan:

• All — every active vehicle and caravan together. This is the default.
• Vehicles — just your tow vehicles.
• Trailers — just your caravans and trailers.
• Archived — assets you have put away, such as a rig you have sold. These are kept for the record and shown dimmed; tap one to restore it if you change your mind.

Archived assets are deliberately tucked behind their own chip so they do not clutter the rigs you actually use. Nothing is lost when you archive — its weigh-ins, service records, and warranty dates all stay attached, ready if you ever bring it back.

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Choosing your active rig

This is the part that makes the garage more than a list. You may own more than one tow vehicle, or more than one caravan, but you only travel with one of each at a time. The pair you are using is your active rig, and the strip at the top of the garage is where you choose it. The strip has two boxes — your active vehicle on the left, your active caravan on the right — with a chain link between them. Tap the vehicle box to open a sheet listing your vehicles, with the current one ticked; choose another to switch. Tap the caravan box to open the matching sheet for your caravans, including a No trailer option for travelling solo. If your active caravan is heavier than your active vehicle is rated to tow, the strip flags it with a small caution dot beside the caravan’s name — a quiet nudge that the pair you have chosen is over the towing limit and worth a closer look. Switching matters because loadmate scores the rig you have chosen, not all of them at once. The active vehicle and active caravan are the pair every limit check, load placement, and score is worked out for. Pick the wrong pair and the numbers are for a rig you are not actually towing.

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Hitching and unhitching

The chain link in the middle of the strip is more than decoration. When you have a caravan selected, it shows a joined link, meaning you are hitched. When no caravan is selected, it shows a broken link, meaning the vehicle is travelling solo. Tap the chain to change that. If you are hitched, tapping it asks you to confirm before unhitching. If you are not hitched, tapping it opens the caravan selector so you can hitch one up. The caravan selector does one more safety job here: if a caravan’s laden limit (ATM in Australia, MTPLM in the UK, Trailer GVWR in the US, or GTWR in Europe/international) is heavier than what your active vehicle is rated to tow, the sheet flags that caravan with a full amber caution band and a warning triangle before you hitch — so the warning reaches you while you can still act on it. Hitching and unhitching is not just a label change. It tells loadmate the rig has changed, so it marks the score for that vehicle as needing a fresh look and recalculates. A hitched rig and a solo vehicle are two different safety pictures, and the score reflects whichever one you are in.

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When you have just one vehicle, or only a caravan

A new garage often holds a single tow vehicle and no caravan yet. In that case loadmate shows the vehicle on its own and, just below it, a gentle prompt to add a caravan — because combined towing compliance and stability scoring need both halves of the rig to read from. You are not stuck; the prompt simply points at the natural next step. If instead you have added a caravan but no tow vehicle yet, the garage shows your caravan and a card inviting you to add a vehicle. In this caravan-only state there is no rig to choose yet, so the selector strip does not appear — it returns once you have added a vehicle to pair with. A caravan with nothing to tow it has no hitched compliance to check, so loadmate nudges you to complete the pair.

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Where to go next

The garage is the hub; each setup task has its own page with step-by-step guidance. Start with whichever you need.