A Cautionary Tale About an Almost-Accident While Hauling

On Saturday morning I was less than five minutes from the barn, Connor in the trailer behind me, headed out for the haul to the clinic facility.  I was in the right lane of a 4 lane + center turn lane state highway that runs through my town.  We were in a commercial area (Target, Best Buy, Starbucks, etc), but it was early and there wasn't a ton of traffic.

My husband still asks me when the other half of my horse trailer is being delivered.

I was leaving a safe following distance doing about 30mph in a 35 when a newer F-150 pulled out in front of me.  There was no reason for that, there was a huge gap of maybe 1/2 mile clear behind me.

That by itself was manageable, but almost immediately after that, a Honda Accord in front of the F-150 made a right turn either without signaling or with a very late signal. The F-150 responded by slamming on his brakes, and because I still hadn't had enough time to increase my following distance by enough after he pulled out in front of me, I had to slam on mine too.  I heard Connor slam into the divider as I came to a stop maybe an inch or two from the F-150's bumper.

Connor was fine, he didn't go down, I pulled off the road to check on him almost immediately, but I'm sure it wasn't fun for him. 

Divider latched open (upper left) for cleaning.

The whole thing was scary, stupid and avoidable if people just had more situational awareness.  I had almost two hours of driving to think about it after that, and I kept coming back to the following three things:

- I generally hate left lane drivers, but on that state highway, it's much safer for the truck and trailer to be in the left lane, which has a turn lane.  The right lane does not, and people suck at using turn signals.

- If we had gotten into an accident, the F-150 wouldn't have been the at-fault driver, even though he would have been 100% responsible for the whole thing by pulling out in front of me.

- If I had had my old trailer behind me, which weighed 1,400lbs more, we would have gotten into an accident.  I had just enough time to stop the 2,100lb Shadow, anything more and we would have been in the F-150's tailgate.

That last one in particular...I have a 2005 GMC Sierra 1500, Denali edition, totally loaded with every option possible, including towing options.  It's rated to pull 7,000lbs.  My old trailer was a 2H straight load BP with tack room, steel frame aluminum skin, weighing 3,500lbs empty and ~5,000lbs loaded. 

Actually, this is my old trailer, at the show last weekend!  The new owners are in love with it.  It's the mom and her 9 y/o daughter's first trailer, and they're enjoying the freedom.

On paper, that was absolutely more than enough truck for the trailer.  I could move it, I could stop it, I had no issues driving it in normal traffic, besides having to plan ahead to stop gracefully at stoplights.  But I definitely would not have had enough truck, weight-wise, to stop it quickly in an emergency situation like I experienced last weekend. 

New trailer (foreground), old trailer (background)

With the Shadow, I can brake almost normally like there isn't a trailer behind me, because the truck is heavy enough in relation to the trailer to help the brakes out quite a bit.  And that's the only thing that kept me and Connor from being in an accident last weekend.

So that was scary, but it could have ended up being way more scary.  Definitely keep emergency situations in mind when you size your next truck and trailer purchase!