isky Move

Updated Sat. Oct. 22 2005 7:27 PM ET

Ivan Langrish, W-FIVE Associate Producer, CTV News

They're big, orange and on the move. Orange is the colour of the familiar do-it-yourself moving company U-Haul. With some 1,500 dealers in Canada, it ranks as the country's largest moving vehicle rental company. But a W-FIVE investigation has found that, all too often, U-Haul trucks don't meet provincial safety standards.

W-FIVE rented vehicles in four provinces and took them to licensed mechanics to see if they met provincial safety standards. From Quebec, to Ontario, Alberta to British Columbia, in every case the U-Hauls inspected failed.

Of course, few relish the task of packing up all of their belongings into one truck, but for most, it is an inevitable chore. After the truck is crammed full and you are on your way to your destination the last thing on your mind is the safety of the vehicle you rented.

Dan Donnelle's move is a case in point. Last year Donnelle wanted to find an inexpensive way to move some furniture from Woodbridge to Toronto. He decided to rent a U-Haul truck.

Donnelle was driving 100 kilometres an hour on one of Canada's busiest roads, Highway 400, north of Toronto, when all of a sudden he heard a noise.

"It was really scary. I was just trying to keep the truck on the road."

Suddenly, the two back wheels of his U-Haul truck came flying off.

"One went towards the middle of the median. The other went in front of the truck around into the ditch and the truck literally bounced about eight or nine times in the air," recalls Donnelle.

With some skillful driving and lots of luck, Donnelle managed to pull the lame vehicle to the side of the road, scared but happy to be alive.

Roadside inspections

Long before Donnelle's hair-raising encounter, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) expressed serious concerns about the safety of U-Haul's trucks. That was because U-Hauls checked at OPP roadside safety checks were failing at an alarming rate.

"They're driving in and the failure rate has really been high," says Sgt. Cam Woolley of the OPP. "They've been hugely over-represented. I've been checking trucks for over 25 years and (U-Haul has) probably one of the worst rates I've ever seen."

The statistics reflect Woolley's concern. Between 2002 and 2004, the OPP inspected 220 U-Haul vehicles during roadside safety checks; 109 failed, almost half of all U-Haul's checked.

Woolley says the OPP have tried to work with U-Haul over the years.

"We've tried to help them. We've gone through the reports. We've actually invited them out to see the type of problems. And I've had experience with other companies where that has been successful, where once they get a handle on it they're able to fix it."

Ontario police aren't the only ones concerned. Brian Patterson, the president of the Ontario Safety League, has U-Haul directly in his crosshairs. Patterson was so appalled at the OPP's findings he did his own tests. Patterson took seven U-Hauls to registered mechanics to see if the vehicles were safe. They weren't; all seven vehicles had safety problems.

"In my review of the evidence I can only draw one conclusion… they have systematically chosen to allow a shoddy safety record to be part of their business plan," charges Patterson. "You don't rent a chainsaw and expect the chain to fly off. And you shouldn't rent a rental vehicle and expect to find it in worse condition than your own vehicle. It's shocking."

Ontario government action

After the results from the OPP and the Ontario Safety League's tests, the province's Ministry of Transportation decided to take a look at the entire self-drive truck rental industry. It didn't take long to single out U-Haul as the worst safety offender.

"This kind of behavior is not acceptable in Ontario. And we will not tolerate it," said Transportation Minister Harinder Takhar.

This past summer, staff from Takhar's ministry checked 693 trucks from 14 rental companies in Ontario; U-Haul's failure rate was four times the industry average. He had strong words for the Arizona-based company.

"You clean up your act, otherwise you will not be able to do business in this province," Takhar said he told them. "I have to bring the hammer down."

Even though the Ministry of Transportation gave U-Haul weeks to get their act together some vehicles continued to fail roadside safety checks.

The failures came as no surprise to a former U-Haul employee, who spoke with W-FIVE on the condition of anonymity. She said that the company message to its employees is that safety is not a major concern.

"If it says 'preventative maintenance due,' our orders at our office is it doesn't mean anything, ignore it. Send it out anyways."

W-FIVE's test

W-FIVE decided to undertake its own tests across the country. The plan was simple: rent U-Haul vans in four major cities in Canada and see if they would pass the safety standards in their respective provinces. The results were shocking.

In Vancouver, W-FIVE rented four U-Haul trucks. Not a single one passed the provincial safety standard. Problems ranged from leaky brakes, bad steering, lights not working, worn-out batteries. One truck even needed a boost at the mechanic shop.

Similar issues also arose in Montreal. Four trucks were rented, four failures.

Even in the province where the OPP and the Ministry of Transportation has been cracking down on U-Haul, not a single truck passed. All four trucks rented by W-FIVE in Toronto failed to meet the minimum provincial safety standards. The mechanic found problems ranging from bad brakes to dangerous holes in the exhaust to a broken gearshift.

"I found the gear shift is not properly aligned, it might be a worn or broken cable," master mechanic Feroz Khamis told W-FIVE. "Drive shows as Park. If you want to reverse this vehicle you have to put the gear shifter in Drive."

The final test was in Calgary. That truck failed too. The mechanic found 14 defects in all and decided it was too dangerous to even be on the road. So W-FIVE phoned the U-Haul hotline to get the truck towed away.

Reporter Victor Malarek was placed on hold again and again as W-FIVE tried to get U-Haul to deal with the problem. It took six hours in all before U-Haul came to tow the truck.

Final tally

After renting 13 U-Haul trucks across the country, W-FIVE found not a single one passed basic provincial standards. Each truck required some sort of maintenance to make it roadworthy.

According to the former employee W-FIVE interviewed, you are most likely to receive a safe truck in Ontario, because of the attention the OPP is paying to the vehicles.

"As soon as that happened, well, all hell broke loose to begin with, because everything that we sent to Ontario or further east … So anything that had to travel through Ontario had to actually be safe."

Of the trucks rented by W-FIVE, the average age was 13 years and the average mileage was more than 200,000 kilometres.

Oddly enough, nearly every U-Haul truck is plated out of Arizona even if it has never left Canada, something Cam Woolley calls a loophole.

"When it's out of province like Arizona they can call their home state and say they lost the plate. The state has no way of knowing the circumstances on which the plate was seized."

Police can make sure an unsafe vehicle with Ontario plates doesn't get back on the road, but that's not necessarily the case if the plate is from out of the country. When a U-Haul plate is seized in Canada, the company could simply say the plate has gone missing and have new plates sent, no questions asked. This makes it much more difficult for police to track vehicles with poor safety records.

W-FIVE asked U-Haul's Canadian Vice-President Claude Boucher about the findings of poor maintenance and shoddy safety record.

"There's no excuse for that, there really isn't," says Boucher. "We're looking at the age of our fleet and we're going to replace the age, our oldest trucks."

Boucher acknowledged the company has avoided taking action despite numerous warnings from the OPP and Ontario's Ministry of Transportation.

"Well, they were talking to us, we just weren't listening. But they do have our attention now," states Boucher. "We're not proud of our safety record."

But the whistleblowing former U-Haul employee who spoke with W-FIVE still doesn't believe U-Haul vehicles are safe and said she would not rent one "in a million years."