Driving a 26-Foot U-Haul Truck Is a Dumb Thing to Do | The Online Automotive Marketplace | Hemmings (2024)

Most people spend their two-week vacations leisurely tanning themselves by a pool somewhere. Or camping, or going to Walley World, or stamp collecting – you know, something fun. For my two weeks, I made one of the dumbest decisions of my life by renting a U-Haul, packing it with stuff, hitching a car trailer to it, and driving it halfway across the country.

After living in Bennington, Vermont, for close to 20 years, I’d accumulated way too many things. Even after mitigating that somewhat during a two-month purge, I still had my half-finished electric Chenowth project, a garage full of tools (never ever ever get rid of tools), and an entire household of books, artwork, and all the other things one can’t bear to live without. I initially reserved a 20-foot U-Haul truck online, but after noting how much stuff was still making the move, I bumped it up to a 26-footer, the largest truck that U-Haul rents out.

It was a fine beast, a Ford F-650 Super Duty chassis with a Triton 6.8L gasoline V-10 under the hood and a shiny chrome grille and bumper like what used to adorn every land yacht on the highway in days of yore. I neglected to get the model year off the VIN, but it had just 31,000 miles on it when I started out, so it was fairly fresh. For those of us used to driving amid passenger cars on a daily basis, it’s difficult to accurately convey the size of it – somewhere between a dump truck and a semi – which is why I wasn’t entirely prepared for what I saw when I picked it up.

“Don’t you need a CDL to drive one of those?” I asked the clerk at the U-Haul franchise, only mildly joking.

Both of these require parking spaces in a truck stop. Only one of these requires a CDL.Photo by Daniel Strohl

No, you do not, and that’s problematic. This is a vehicle that requires cab lights and multiple steps to get into it. It has air brakes, it looks like it’d fit three rhinoceroses and a circus tent inside, and it weighs more than some houses. The clerk barely checked my Class D Vermont driver’s license, which covers all motor vehicles except motorcycles and school buses.

Instead, the main point of order was going over the truck to note any dings and dents that it’d suffered during previous rentals and to stress that I should note whatever damage it incurs while under my care. The fact that damage to the truck was their main concern should have been ominous and revealing. Same with the fact that the clerk didn’t offer word one about how to operate the truck, how to navigate traffic in something five times the size of most mommy fortress SUVs, best loading practices, how to avoid obstacles in the urban and suburban environment, or even the total clearance height of the truck. The clerk did show me how to connect the hitch, but when it came to loading and securing a car onto the trailer, my assurance that I’d trailered a car before was good enough. I had the keys in my hand before I saw the interior of the cab.

I’ve driven U-Hauls (albeit smaller ones) across the country. I’ve trailered much heavier loads than my Chenowth. I believed I had an appropriate level of experience to take on this challenge. And I’m probably the exception among the general driving populace, so a warning from the clerk that driving this Ford would be unlike driving anything I’m used to would have been a welcome acknowledgement that U-Haul recognizes the inherent danger in renting out behemoths approaching the size of a semi to people who probably last saw a driver’s license examination during the Clinton administration.

Count the number of stickers you see here.Photo by Daniel Strohl

That said, the cab of the truck is full of admonishments and reminders here and there in the form of stickers placed on every surface visible from the driver’s seat. “Speed Kills. Slow Down and Live” warns one sticker placed right over the speedometer. Another advises to not hit your head on the mom’s attic when climbing into the truck. The 12-foot overall clearance merits two stickers – one on the A-pillar and one in reverse on the leading edge of the box so you see it in the mirror – leading me to wonder how many lawsuits it takes for U-Haul to add another sticker. And how many will eventually result from the entire cab becoming sticker information overload, both distracting the driver and at the same time providing enough white noise that the driver ignores them?

Speaking of stickers, one of the more prominent ones has nothing to do with safety. Instead, it advises that, to get the best mileage, keep the blue bar above the line. What blue bar and what line? I haven’t been in enough late model Ford trucks to know, and the U-Haul clerk scurried away before I could ask. As I soon learned, this was an attempt to gamify fuel mileage. Right in the middle of the instrument panel, a display shows a blue column that increases or decreases in height depending on how much you have your foot into the throttle. Floor it, and the column shrinks; lift on a downhill, and the column climbs toward the top. The white line sat right in the middle, presumably the minimum for “good” gas mileage. Despite the poor UX design – where’s the numbers? who’s to decide what’s good gas mileage in something with the aerodynamics of a brick? shouldn’t “bar” denote something horizontal rather than vertical? – it soon became one of my primary references in understanding the truck.

Watch the blue bar. I mean the road, watch the road!Photo by Daniel Strohl

Any hill, no matter how slight, causes the blue column to plummet. Feathering the throttle, or driving with the egg under it, gets the column right under the white line. Downhills, as previously mentioned, do get the column above the white line, but the truck’s 6R140 six-speed automatic transmission has been programmed to detect downhills, particularly when in tow mode, and gets downshift happy to keep fully loaded trucks from becoming headline news for the local “if it bleeds, it leads” TV news station. It even inscrutably downshifted anytime I hit 60 miles per hour, regardless of how light my foot rested on the throttle.

It seemed there was little I could do to win the blue bar game until I got out of Vermont and onto four-lane highways, when I could finally engage cruise control, the game’s cheat mode. With cruise on, the transmission became less downshift happy, I could actually exceed 60 MPH in top gear, and the blue column came to a rest just above the white line. I could set it at 62 and relax a little.

And that presented another problem. Your natural inclination when on the highway with cruise control in any vehicle is to sit back, get comfortable, and start to tune out. Take in the scenery, sing along with the radio, let the mind wander, and trust the vehicle. Even this big bruiser with rubber floor mats and crank windows has enough padding in the seat, power on tap, cold air coming out of the vents, controls on the steering wheel, and a windshield expansive enough to lull you into a false sense of command. You got this, the road hums at you through the drone of the tires. It’s silly to worry about speed and momentum. You’re entirely comfortable with the truck. There’s nothing to fear, really.

Indeed, out on the open highway, it’s not a difficult vehicle to drive. It accelerates far more briskly when in high gear than one would expect from something so loaded down. It’s no drag racer, but it’s no cruise ship either. Thanks to the high perch, visibility is excellent. I could see much farther down the road than I was used to, though I quickly learned to refer to the mirrors – especially the blind spot mirrors – both while at speed and before negotiating lane changes or turns. Braking is slow at first – more like stepping on a brick – but then quickly gets aggressive beyond moderate pedal pressure with the power assist, allowing more car-like stopping distances. It handles surprisingly well, with a turn radius tighter than one would expect for something with the wheelbase of a half-dozen Duesenbergs. Long-haul truckers become your big brothers on the road, blocking for you so you can make lane changes, giving you the all-clear flash, and respecting distances. The jounce of the springs becomes rhythmic on the rivers of asphalt. You’re just eating up miles like it’s your job.

Get into a city or construction, however, and you get jolted right out of your reverie with a reminder of how unbelievably irresponsible it is for anybody but a trained professional to take the wheel of one of these things. The bridge girder suspension takes potholes the same way fifth graders take dodgeballs to the face. Concrete causes an odd and violent resonance akin to an old-timey jiggly exercise belt on a plane enduring turbulence above an exploding Mount St. Helens. It’s only with all the shaking and jostling that you remember there’s a loaded trailer on the back and that, no matter how sure you are of the straps and how tight they were when you checked them at the last stop, you’re sure something will come flying loose and do a Final Destination on the windshield of the tailgater behind. Narrow lanes, split lanes, left exits, cutoffs, road workers stepping out into traffic all had me on high alert, checking every vector, looking for blind spot lingerers, and trying to keep the truck from getting a Jersey barrier rash because, after all, the most important thing the U-Haul clerk impressed upon me was returning the truck without a scratch on it.

The Chenowth looks puny on the trailer behind the 26-foot U-Haul.Photo by Daniel Strohl

Oh, the trailer, let’s not forget the trailer. The Chenowth looked like a children’s toy strapped to the thing, and I probably could have just chucked it into the box with everything else instead of going through the extra expense and hassle of the trailer. I probably would have done so had I seen the trailer’s hitch setup. The latch on the ball hitch was a simple plastic flapper, and while the trailer had the requisite safety chains and emergency trailer brakes, the safety chains were only secured with some cracked and weathered rubber grommets that looked one cosmic ray away from disintegrating entirely. Nor did the trailer have a provision for padlocking the hitch, so I wasn’t very comfortable leaving the combo out of my sight throughout the entire trip.

As for the mileage, my back-of-the-envelope calculations put it at 7.6 miles per gallon. Still, range was decent – nearing 500 miles – thanks to a fuel tank so large my credit card wouldn’t actually let me fill it all the way up. I can only imagine what the mileage would have been without the blue bar game or had I not been able to do as much of the drive on interstates with cruise control set.

Fortunately, I made the trip without incident. I returned the truck to U-Haul with no more scratches on it than when it left Vermont. Nothing got stress tested other than my nerves.

Unfortunately, I probably would end up renting another U-Haul like this if I had to make another similar move. Compared to the combined costs of professional movers and auto transporters, this was a fraction of the cost, which really makes this the only option for many people. I only wish the requirements for renting trucks as large as these were more stringent or that there were better instruction for operating something so far out of most people’s familiarity zones. There’s a reason, after all, that truck drivers have to spend months learning how to handle big rigs.

Then again, there’s a third option: Sell everything, down to the last toothbrush, and hop a flight to wherever you’re going. I’ll probably do that before my next move, just to avoid making another dumb mistake like this again.

UPDATE (24.May 2023): It’s not lost on me that, as I was writing this, a nutcase in another 26-foot U-Haul tried to breach the security perimeter around the White House, yet another in a long line of reprehensibles who’ve used moving trucks to commit acts of violence, terrorism, and murder. We probably don’t need to take remove-your-shoes-for-security, no-drive-list measures to restrict U-Haul rentals, but maybe if rental truck clerks took more time the explain the vehicles to their customers, as I suggested above, they’d better be able to spot suspicious activities.