Though designed and registered with a total weight of only 31 tons, including cargo, all Chinese-produced dump trucks, particularly Dongfeng trucks, carry up to 60 tons or even 77 tons in reality.

They have been found rampantly rumbling on roads to the helplessness of the traffic police force and concerned agencies.

Dubbed ‘stealthy trucks,' Dongfeng dump trucks do substantial damage to roads, cause irreversible air and noise pollution, aggravate already complicated traffic and are the culprit in a large number of fatal road accidents.

However, these Grim Reaper trucks keep driving recklessly and inflict horrors on highways as well as provincial, suburban and even urban roads all day long, while there’s little the police and concerned authorities can do to curb the plague.

Rampancy

According to Da Nang City’s Automobile Registry Center, there are roughly 1,000 Dongfeng dump trucks in operation citywide. The soaring demand to transport construction materials from and to construction sites throughout the city gave rise to the Dongfeng trucks’ foray.

The low price and huge hydraulically operated open-box bed hinged at the rear give Dongfeng a strong competitive edge over such brands as Hyundai and Kamaz, which have instantly lost ground to their Chinese rival.

According to Binh, who owns a construction material transportation business, those armed with fleets of Dongfengs immediately offer considerably lower prices for their services, leaving others with Japanese and Korean vehicles in distress.

Most enterprises soon switch to Dongfeng, expanding the city’s fleets.

“Dongfeng dump trucks transporting dirt or construction materials all exceed their weight limit. The vehicle automatically gets double the permitted weight when its open-box bed is filled to the brim with dirt or loose materials,” Binh stressed.

Hai, a Dongfeng driver, revealed that dump trucks are supposed to be filled to the brim as required by the deal between the transportation business and the project owner. The trucks can’t pass the construction site gate unless they’re topped up.

“We’re just hired drivers, so we have no choice and don’t really care about being fined for overloading,” he asserted.

Nguyen Huong, director of the Da Nang Automobile Registry Center, noted that Dongfeng dump trucks are only suitable to be filled with light cargo, which is the last thing truck owners want.

Lurking dangers

According to Pham Dinh Dung, a seasoned driver in Hanoi, driving such seriously overloaded trucks is extremely high-risk.

“With the right load, the brakes instantly work as soon as we apply them, but when the truck is overloaded, the brakes sometimes fail even after we slam on them. Overloading also results in broken springs and blown-out tires,” Dung noted.

“Everyone on the road should steer clear of the trucks for their own safety, even when they are empty of cargo, as they all are on insurance and the hired drivers are reckless and ignore others’ safety,” he advised.

According to Nguyen Huu Tri, vice head of the country’s Registry Office, overloading accelerates trucks’ downgrade as their engines are always operating at full power, soon wearing out parts such as brakes, tyres and the vehicle's motion-transferring kit, all of which cut short the trucks’ ‘lifespan’ and require considerably more maintenance.

Hard to put harness on

Statistics from the Vietnam Road General Office from early January this year show that the country is home to roughly 652,111 trucks, among which 3,725 vehicles weigh 20 tons and above.

However, overloading is rampant among both small and big trucks. In other countries, several types of heavy trucks are only allowed to run on roads within construction and mining sites, but in Vietnam, they keep rumbling on public roads day in and day out, the office revealed.

Chinese-made trucks, the most common of which are Dongfeng, Howo and Cuu Long, account for almost 80 percent of the country’s heavy truck fleet.

Meanwhile, as trucks are considered a conventional import, there remain no rules on the dimensions of the open-box bed during the import process.

The designed cargo load doesn’t match with the open-box bed’s dimensions in reality. 

For instance, with China’s Howo ZZ3317N3867C1 trucks, according to the manufacturer, the truck’s own weight is 15.32 tons and the cargo should weigh 15 tons at most. However, if its 37.28 m3 open-box bed is filled to the brim with broken stones, the truck then weighs 69.14 tons in total. If the truck only carries 15 tons of broken stones as designed, the thickness of the stone pile measures only 0.56 m, while the open-box bed is 2m high, which doesn’t give the truck owner big profits.

To make their business even more lucrative, many truck owners increase the open-box bed’s height by 30 cm, which means their trucks and cargo weigh up to 77.21 tons in total.

“These trucks far exceed 30 tons, the load capacity limit. Nowhere else in the world are these trucks allowed to run on highways,” said Hoang The Luc, from the Road General Office.

Far exceeding the limits, such vehicles as Dongfeng and Howo should be discontinued from use.

“It all now depends on the traffic police force to make sure the truck owners keep to the load limit,” concluded Huong, from the registry office.

Outraged residents in several areas have taken the matter in their own hands and created blockades to stop the overloaded trucks from entering certain roads, which are undergoing serious damage.