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The most common question I get asked? ‘How heavy are your hardtops?’

how-heavy-are-your-hardtops

As you’d imagine, I get asked a lot of questions about hardtops, which I’m always delighted to answer.  While you’d expect most of them to be about models, features and colour matching, one of the most common is about how heavy they are!

It’s all down to people’s concerns that the weight of the hardtop will reduce the total payload of their pick-up truck, which will mean it could be classed as a passenger vehicle rather than a Light Commercial Vehicle (LCV).

From a tax perspective, and therefore from a money-saving perspective, this is really important!

The answer is simple and brings relief to the three or four different people who ask me every week. 

No!

For Benefit in Kind (BIK) tax purposes, HMRC class hardtops as having a notional weight of 45kg, even if the actual weight of the canopy is double that, which is quite often the case.  This means that the pick-up’s payload won’t drop below the 1000kg threshold that would change the vehicle’s class.

Anyone who has made the switch from car to LCV will have experienced the tax benefits that come with driving a pick-up as a company vehicle.

I’m no different.  I used to drive an Audi as my company car, which cost me several hundred pounds a month in tax. When I joined Truckman I switched to a pick-up and saw my tax drop to £80 per month. 

The difference pays for a family holiday!  Plus, of course, pick-up users get the benefit of extra, secure storage space once they’ve had their Truckman hardtop fitted.

It’s not often we want to hear the word ‘no’ but when it comes to whether the weight of a hardtop will cause a pick-up owner to pay more BIK tax, it’s the best two-letter word there is!



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