Ok I am a bit of a dummy even though I have been around comercial trucks most of my 53 years and back in the 70s here in canada even drove one and for the past 10 years I have been running bulldozers for a living. There is one thing I am haveing a problem with.In the new trucks I understand the GVW stands for gross vehicle weight and the tare is the amount of load since here we are stuck with metric we usually now refer to them as tandems and triaxles but when I was younger we refered to trucks as 5 ton single axles and 10 ton tandems and 15 ton tandems. Now that was I presumed the amount of weight it could haul. My 53 GVW is 16000 for a total of 8 tons the truck itself cant weigh more than 3 tons leaving 10000 or 5 tons so we would have called it a 5 ton truck but does the actual weight of the truck determine what the truck is refered to making mine a 3 ton?.