A lot of caravan buying goes wrong in a very specific, very avoidable way: someone falls for a van, checks that the ATM is under their car's braked towing capacity, and stops there. One number checked, ticked, sorted.
It isn't sorted. Towing capacity is only one of at least four things that all have to hold true at once: your car's braked towing capacity, its GCM (the combined weight of car and van together, fully loaded), its GVM, and your towbar's own ball weight rating. A van can pass on towing capacity and still put you over GCM once you've loaded the car with passengers and gear. That's a real number, and it's a real legal limit, and it's the one buyers miss most often.
What Tow Match actually checks
VanVerdict's Tow Match is built to stop that specific mistake. Set your tow vehicle up once, four fields to start: make, model, braked towing capacity, GCM, ball weight limit. From there, every caravan you capture gets checked against it automatically.
The result is always one of four things, never a guess dressed up as a fact:
- Green. Within every limit that's been checked.
- Amber. Within the limits, but the margin is thin.
- Red. Over a legal limit. Don't tow it.
- Not enough information. Shown whenever fewer than all four checks have actually run.
That last one matters more than it looks. A lot of towing calculators will show you a confident green tick off a single number. VanVerdict won't. One check passing out of four is, honestly, the most dangerous thing a towing panel could show you, because it looks like reassurance and it isn't one. So the app is built to say "not enough information" until it genuinely has enough.
Refine it as you go
The first step is deliberately short, four fields, a real result. Past that, a set of collapsed "refine this" sections let you add your car's kerb mass, any permanent additions like a bar or drawers, your typical trip load, and, if you've actually had the loaded rig weighed, a real weighbridge figure. Each section tells you plainly what filling it in unlocks. A weighbridge reading, when you have one, always overrules the calculated number, because a scale beats an estimate every time.
Where it shows up
You don't have to go looking for it. The first time you enter a caravan's ATM and you don't yet have a usable tow vehicle on file, VanVerdict asks you, once, whether you'd like to check. Once it's set up, the result sits right there on the van's checklist too, feeding three of the towing and weight checks automatically.
It's a small feature, four fields to start, but it's built to answer one specific, expensive question honestly: not whether the van looks like it should fit, but whether it actually, legally does.
The VanVerdict team