Dimensions for caravans and motorhomes — width, height and length

Dimensions

Dimensions: width, height and length

The EU directive does NOT apply to a car-and-caravan outfit

This is the most important thing in the whole section, and it contradicts what every camping blog repeats.

The figures 2.55 m wide, 4.00 m high and an 18.75 m vehicle combination come from directive 96/53/EC, annex I point 1. But article 1 limits the scope to

motor vehicles in categories M2 and M3 and their trailers in category O and motor vehicles in categories N2 and N3 and their trailers in categories O3 and O4

A car is M1 and a caravan under 3.5 tonnes is O1 or O2. The outfit lies entirely outside the directive. To quote 2.55/4.00/18.75 for a caravan would be to borrow authority from a text that is not about it.

The dimensions for a car with a caravan are therefore national and have to be retrieved country by country. Retrieved 2026-08-06.

And the national dimensions apply to you, not only to their own vehicles

The next objection is close at hand: if the figures are national, why should Hungary's bind a Swedish-registered caravan? The question is not hypothetical. Hungary's own regulation, 6/1990 KöHÉM 1. § (2), expressly says that for foreign vehicles from a state party to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic (Vienna, 8 November 1968), annex 5 of the convention applies. Read that reference as it stands and the national figures would fall away for every foreign caravan.

The convention has been read. Annex 5 contains no dimensions at all — it is called Technical conditions concerning motor vehicles and trailers and has four chapters: brakes, lamps and reflecting devices, other requirements, exemptions. The dimensions are instead in annex 1 point 1, and it says the exact opposite:

Contracting Parties may refuse to admit to their territories in international traffic motor vehicles, trailers or combinations of vehicles whose over-all weight or weight per axle or dimensions exceed the limits fixed by their domestic legislation for vehicles registered in their territories.

The convention therefore expressly reserves to every party the right to apply its own dimension limits to international traffic. Sweden has been a party since 25 July 1985. The figures in the table below are thus not information about how other countries' vehicles may look; they are limits that apply to the outfit you drive there. The amendments to annexes 1 and 5, in force from 9 February 2025 for all parties, do not touch dimensions and leave annex 1 point 1 untouched. The whole argument with sources stands on Hungary's page, where the question arose.

Country by country

Each country's dimensions with its article of law stand on the country page:

• Sweden — 80 km/h
• Norway — 80 km/h
• Denmark — 80 km/h
• Finland — 80 km/h
• Germany — 80 km/h
• Netherlands — 80 km/h
• Belgium — 70 km/h
• Luxembourg — 75 km/h
• Poland — 70 km/h
• Czechia — 90 km/h
• Slovakia — 90 km/h
• Austria — 70 km/h
• Switzerland — 80 km/h
• Liechtenstein — 80 km/h
• France — 80 km/h
• Spain — 80 km/h
• Andorra — 90 km/h
• Portugal — 70 km/h
• Italy — 70 km/h
• Slovenia — 90 km/h
• Croatia — 90 km/h
• Hungary — 70 km/h
• Estonia — 90 km/h
• Latvia — 90 km/h
• Lithuania — 90 km/h
• United Kingdom — 80 km/h
• Ireland — 80 km/h
• Romania — 80 km/h
• Bulgaria — 80 km/h
• Greece — 80 km/h
• Serbia — 80 km/h
• Bosnia and Herzegovina — 80 km/h
• Montenegro — 80 km/h
• North Macedonia — 80 km/h
• Albania — 70 km/h
• Kosovo — 80 km/h
• Moldova — 70 km/h
• Ukraine — 80 km/h
• Belarus — 70 km/h
• Türkiye — 80 km/h
• Gibraltar — 35 km/h
• Monaco — 70 km/h
• San Marino — 70 km/h
• Vatican City — 70 km/h

No country remains unretrieved

All forty countries in the list above now have both speed and dimensions with an article of law. Andorra and Liechtenstein were the last, and they came in together with a new map: both are missing from Natural Earth 110m and therefore lay inside the neighbour's polygon. Hungary was the country before that, and came in through a different door from the one we first hammered on.

Method note: a blocked site is not the same as a blocked country. The official consolidated statute collection njt.hu completes the TLS handshake and then resets the HTTP request from every client we have tried — curl with and without forced IPv4, with TLS 1.2 as the ceiling, without ALPN, over HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, with a full browser header set, plus wget, python urllib and the built-in fetcher. All of them get ECONNRESET from an F5 BigIP in front of the site. That still holds. The conclusion we drew from it did not: Hungary was written up as unretrieved even though net.jogtar.hu, which already carried the country's speed row, serves the whole consolidated 6/1990 KöHÉM to ordinary curl. A source we already trusted was enough. The error was not that a site was closed but that we stopped looking when it was, and let the first blockage become the verdict on the whole country. The lesson is that what should be written up is which site blocked, never which country would therefore be impossible.

What the forty retrieved countries have shown: not one of them has the same set.

‡ Hungary's height cell carries two figures because the law does. 5. § (2) of 6/1990 KöHÉM sets 4.00 m for vehicles in general and 3.00 m for a car's trailer — a full metre below every other country's height limit, and the lowest figure in the whole material. The paragraph is moreover the only one in the whole of 5. § without an amendment mark: it is the original 1990 wording. Hungary has no legal definition of a caravan, so the caravan is a személygépkocsi pótkocsija straight off, exactly the words the paragraph uses.

§ Gibraltar has two sets of dimension rules on the same road, and the row above is only one of them. Schedule 4 to the Vehicles (Construction, Equipment and Maintenance) Regulations gives the usual EU figures, and reg. 5A(1) pulls in "motor vehicles, trailers, semi-trailers and vehicle combinations" without category or goods conditions. But regulation 6 makes every vehicle over 2.14 m wide, 3.65 m high or 6.40 m long an oversized vehicle — dimensions that virtually every motorhome and caravan exceeds. That figure deliberately does not stand in the table. Being oversized is not a driving prohibition but a classification: the consequence is reg. 7's red "O" on a white ground, 20 × 30 cm front and rear on the left, and driving without the mark is the offence. Had 2.14 stood in the width cell, the dimension guard would have warned "too wide" for nearly every outfit that ever drives there, and warned about something that is not prohibited. The sharp consequence lies instead in a third instrument: Control of Traffic Regulations reg. 19(1) prohibits "an oversized vehicle or a caravan" entirely within the Inner City, the old walled town. The caravan cell is therefore 12.00 for the whole of Gibraltar and zero for its inner city, and that is a difference no table can carry. The trailer width is empty by reading: Table 2 has three entries and all three are motor vehicles, while Table 1 names the trailer in plain words in two entries. See Gibraltar's country page.

¶ Monaco, like Gibraltar, has two sets of dimension rules on the same road, the state's and the city's, and they overlap only in part. The height cell's 4.30 is not in the Code de la route at all — the code has no height ceiling — but in article 2 2° of Arrêté municipal n° 2007-256, which is the highest height figure in the whole material and therefore cannot give a false alarm. The width cell goes the other way: the city's regulation permits 2.60, but the code's article 54 1° says 2.55 for les véhicules without a goods condition and puts 2.60 only on refrigerated bodies for temperature-controlled goods, so 2.55 is the figure that binds whichever instrument the reader meets. The outfit cell's 18.35 is the code's train routier, the special rule for a towing vehicle plus trailer, which is looser than the same article's 18 m for an ensemble de véhicules and stricter than the city's 18.75. The caravan cell's twelve metres are measured without the drawbar, word for word non compris le dispositif d'attelage, exactly as in Finland and the United Kingdom.

And then what no cell can carry: article 4 2° of the same municipal regulation prohibits caravans entirely on Monaco's streets and public places, whatever their dimensions. It is the only outright prohibition in the whole material, and it is the reason the dimension guard has been able to carry a prohibition alongside the figures since 2026-08-10. See Monaco's country page.

‖ San Marino's traffic code contains not a single dimension figure. Article 54 of the Codice della strada requires a permit for vehicles that "superino le dimensioni o i pesi consentiti dalla segnaletica stradale" and, for the figures themselves, points away from itself to Legge 20 settembre 1985 n.108, whose article 15 is called "Dimensioni massime dei veicoli". That law is alive — it is missing from the code's own repeal list in article 72 — but article 15 has been rewritten four times, and the row above is the fourth version, Decreto 4 maggio 2004 n.58 art. 3. The difference from the third is not cosmetic: the 1994 version gave width 2.50, motorhome 8.00 and outfit 18.35, that is, three cells wrong out of six. The caravan cell's 2.30 is the strictest dimension in the whole material and will alarm for nearly every modern caravan — the exception names le caravans in plain words and sets three figures of its own on the body, which also means the length is measured without the drawbar. The two length figures are axle alternatives as in Albania. The motorhome keeps 12.00 because the 2004 rewriting removed the sentence about autocaravans that stood until then. See San Marino's country page.

\# Vatican City has no traffic law of its own, and that is searched, not assumed: the Governorate's entire published body of instruments has been gone through serial number by serial number without a single norm on traffic, roads, vehicle dimensions or speed appearing. The figures come in instead through a Vatican law that points to Italian law: Legge N. LXXI del 1 ottobre 2008 sulle fonti del diritto art. 12 § 1 a) 8 lets "gli automobili e la loro circolazione" apply in the state directly, without the recepimento article 3 requires in other subjects. But the reception is frozen to the Italian version in force when the law entered into force, 1 January 2009 — so the row may not be copied from today's Italy without the 2009 text having been read. It has been read: Codice della strada art. 61 in version 13, in force 2008-12-17 to 2011-01-14, gives 2.55 / 4 / 12 compresi gli organi di traino / 16.50 / 18.75, that is, the same five figures as today. The freeze changes nothing in the six cells. The row moreover has a property no other has: it cannot give a false alarm that Italy has not already given, since Vatican City cannot be reached other than over Italian roads under the same figures. No forbud is set, even though the 1929 order required a speciale permesso to drive in — that order has been replaced by a law published only as scanned pages without a text layer. See Vatican City's country page.

† Albania's row is the version in force up to and including 2026-08-05. Since 2026-08-06 neni 61 gives no figures at all but refers to a regulation not yet adopted. The caravan cell is 6.50 m with one axle and 8.00 m with two — half the limit that applies almost everywhere else — and with it goes a height rule that cannot be written in a table cell: at most 1.8 times the caravan's smallest track width.

The cells that do not contain a figure say so for five different reasons.

Belgium's empty cell for the outfit is not a gap in the retrieval but in the law: art. 32bis sets 18.75 m for camion et remorque and nothing at all for a car with a caravan.

Lithuania's and Slovenia's not applicable on the car width is stronger than that: there the car is expressly excepted from the whole instrument — in Lithuania by the heading over section I, in Slovenia by the enumeration in 2. člen. The figures in their rows therefore apply to the caravan, not to the car, and the length limit for the outfit does not exist at all since that row in both countries measures a goods vehicle. That they nevertheless stand in the table is deliberate: those are the figures that circulate as "Lithuania's" and "Slovenia's" limits, and the table should show where they come from.

Ukraine's empty cell for the caravan is a fourth kind. There is no delimiting rule there and no exception: the dimension table in point 22.5 a) simply lists lorry, автопоїзд, tractor unit with semi-trailer and articulated vehicle, and never mentions a trailer on its own. The caravan is therefore limited only through the 22 metres that apply to the outfit it forms part of.

North Macedonia's empty cell for the outfit is the fifth kind, and the cleanest of them all. Prilog I т. 1.1 is an enumeration of nine vehicle types without a residual entry, and the two entries carrying 18.75 m begin with товарно моторно возило and автобус respectively. Where Belgium has a gap between two points and Lithuania and Slovenia an exception in the scope, North Macedonia has neither: the list is exhaustive and never describes a car with a towed vehicle.

The width has not converged as much as it looks. 2.55 applies on most rows, but Sweden, Finland and Ukraine sit higher for the trailer, Germany lower for the car and Ireland lower for both — 2.50 throughout, without an exception a car can reach. The span on width is therefore ten centimetres, from Ireland's 2.50 to Ukraine's 2.60 — and those ten centimetres are the whole reason the width now has a field of its own in the form; see The width. The length has not converged at all. Six of forty countries set a figure other than 18.75 on the outfit and five — Belgium, Lithuania, Slovenia, North Macedonia and Türkiye — set no figure at all; the United Kingdom moreover sets a caravan limit of seven metres that nobody else is near, Albania one of 6.50 and 8.00 and Ukraine no caravan limit at all. Three of the five — Germany, the Netherlands and Bosnia and Herzegovina — moreover land on the same figure, 18.00, for the same reason: their 18.75 is written for a goods trailer. The height splits into seven camps: 4.00 in thirty-one countries, 4.20 in Slovenia, 4.40 in Finland, 4.65 in Ireland, no general limit in Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom and France, per road in Andorra, whose law leaves the whole dimension to the sign — and 3.00 in Hungary, which alone sets a separate, lower height on a car's trailer specifically. The span on height is therefore not ten or sixty-five centimetres but a good metre, from Hungary's 3.00 to Ireland's 4.65, and the country lying lowest does so with the one paragraph in its own dimensions section that has never been amended.

To assume that an unretrieved country resembles its neighbour is therefore not cautious but wrong. The summary "2.55 / 4.00 / 18.75" that circulates in caravan forums holds for twenty-two of the forty countries actually read — a little over half, and it still says nothing about the next country retrieved. Albania is among the twenty-two on precisely those three figures and yet is the country that deviates most, because the caravan's own length and height limits stand in a point those three figures do not cover. Bulgaria is among them for the opposite reason: the figures match exactly, but they stand in a regulation on special transport whose own definition list enumerates buses and goods vehicles. Greece is the cleanest case of all: all three figures match, and yet none of them stands in the traffic law but four references away in an annex that formally applies only to buses and lorries. Romania is the same three figures and the exact opposite in everything else: one reference away, and an annex that defines its own scope without naming a single vehicle category. Bosnia and Herzegovina is another case of the same sort as Germany: two of the three figures match exactly, and the third does not because the outfit's row is split into two points of which only one is about goods. Eighteen of the forty countries deviate on at least one of the three figures — two of them, Lithuania and Slovenia, have no applicable figures at all, since the car is outside the whole instrument's reach, and a third, Andorra, has no figures whatsoever since the law leaves them to the sign — and the deviations follow no pattern: Sweden's 24 metres, Germany's 2.50 on the car, Ireland's 2.50 on both and 4.65 on the height, Finland's 4.40 and Slovenia's 4.20, the United Kingdom's seven metres on the caravan, Ukraine's 2.6 and 22 and Hungary's 3.00 on the trailer have nothing in common except that none of them can be guessed.

The thirteen most recent countries also gave the clearest pattern in the whole section. Lithuania and Slovenia join Belgium and the EU directive as a fourth and fifth example of the same thing: the harmonised figures are written for commercial goods transport, and the car with a caravan lies outside their express scope. Latvia, Ireland, Croatia and Ukraine are the counter-examples showing that this is not a law of nature. In Latvia, point 194 catches every transportlīdzekļu sastāvs without regard to category, and in Croatia čl. 7(1)5) catches every vučno vozilo s prikolicom in the same way — the same row that in Belgium and Slovenia is written about a goods vehicle. Ukraine moreover shows that the delimitation can run straight through one and the same instrument: the word автопоїзд carries the 22 metres in point 22.5 without a category restriction, but the same word in the plate rule in point 30.3 a) applies only to вантажних автомобілях, lorries. Kosovo is the third way of landing correctly: regulation 09/2022 expressly states that it implements 96/53/EC, but writes a scope of its own covering all road users, and the directive's exception for the car and the caravan never came across the border. The same figures, the opposite reach. Albania is the fourth, and the only one requiring no interpretation at all: neni 61.3 writes autokampe and rimorkiove kamp in those words and gives them figures of their own. Nowhere else in the material does one not have to ask whether the rule hits a caravan. That this particular point disappeared when the law was aligned with 96/53/EC says something about what harmonisation does: it lifts in a text written for commercial traffic and lifts out what was written for leisure vehicles. Bulgaria shows the fifth variant: an instrument pointing both ways at once. Чл. 1 catches категориите пътни превозни средства и техните ремаркета without exception, while the definition list in § 1 enumerates M₂, M₃, N₂, N₃ and their trailers and defines a trailer as built for goods transport. That a car with a caravan is nevertheless caught follows from a third definition in the same paragraph — състав от ППС is simply a motor vehicle with a trailer — but the conclusion requires reading all three. Greece is the sixth, and the only one where the delimitation is settled by an instrument lying outside the one containing the figures: the annex in π.δ. 77/1998 enumerates M2, M3, N2, N3 and their trailers exactly as the directive does, but the ministerial decision in ΦΕΚ Β΄ 1703/2009 takes the figures from there and puts them on όλων των οχημάτων, all vehicles. The exception stands untouched in its annex and nevertheless has no effect, since the level above never inherits it. Ireland is the sharpest case, because it is built exactly the other way round: the general rule says "a vehicle" without delimitation, and it is the exceptions that enumerate M2, M3, N2, N3 and their trailers. There it follows from the same category logic that the car is caught — and caught by a lower figure than the one that circulates. Romania is the seventh variant, and the only one where the question never arises. Anexa 2 to OG 43/1997 writes its own scope in a single sentence — orice autovehicul rutier având cel puțin două axe sau un ansamblu format dintr-un autovehicul și semiremorca sau remorca tractată de acesta — without a single vehicle category, without a goods transport requirement and without a weight limit. And should anyone still want to argue that the annex applies only to certain vehicles, there is anexa 3, whose heading expressly takes care of vehiculelor rutiere, altele decât cele prevăzute în anexa nr. 2: it repeats the same vehicle definition word for word and carries identical dimension rows. The delimitation question that decides the outcome in almost every other country in the table is in Romania constructed so that it cannot change anything. Serbia is the eighth, and solves the same question with the opposite device: instead of avoiding the categories, the regulation uses them as a tool. Чл. 11 gives the motorhome the code SA and binds it to category М, gives the caravan the code SE and binds it to category О, and then the dimension articles write their figures on precisely those letters. The exception list in чл. 1 contains three entries — racing vehicles, test vehicles and combat vehicles — and every dimension article repeats for its own part that it does not apply to military vehicles. Where Romania makes the category question impossible to ask, Serbia answers it in plain words, and both end up in the same place. It is also the only country in the material that defines the caravan through an ISO standard: SE is возило дефинисано ознаком 3.2.1.3 стандарда SRPS ISO 3833:2005. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the ninth, and the only one answering the question for foreign vehicles directly in the statute: ZOSPC чл. 204 says that foreign-registered vehicles may take part in traffic glede dimenzija if they meet the conditions applying to vehicles registered in the country. Every other country in the table requires one to infer the same thing from the absence of an exception. Bosnia and Herzegovina also shows that the delimitation can lie inside a single sentence: чл. 5 ст. (2) c) and d) distinguish between skupovi vozila in general and skupovi vozila with a goods trailer, and the whole difference between 18.00 and 18.75 hangs on three words in point d). The conclusion is not "the rules do not apply" but that the question must be asked country by country, that the answer more often than you would think stands in a scope rule and not in the figures annex, and that the delimitation can just as easily strike in the stricter direction.

And the method of measurement differs even where the figure is the same. Twelve metres of caravan does not mean the same caravan in France, Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland and Albania (the coupling device included — and Croatia adds that an adjustable drawbar is measured in its most extended position), the United Kingdom (excluded, and the limit is moreover seven metres) and Finland (the drawbar expressly excluded).

Two of the eight stood among the silent for a long time, and both were moved here after the text they pointed at was actually read. Montenegro had a sentence about the measurement — čl. 15 st. 1 t. 7 measures од вучног ока руде, word for word as Serbia does — but the country looked as though it contradicted itself, since čl. 15 st. 4 carries an exception list of fourteen entries and it was unread. Read in the ministry's own PDF, the entry concerned turns out to be number eleven, "uređaji za spajanje priključnog vozila kod motornih vozila": the coupling on the motor vehicle, that is, the towbar on the car. A caravan is a priključno vozilo, and the exception never reaches its ruda. The paragraph before the list moreover says that everything that extends is counted in its most extended possible position. The contradiction did not exist. Poland says nothing itself but points on in § 2 ust. 5 to (EU) 2021/535 annex XIII part 2 section F, and that question was not investigated. Now it is: section F's table I entry 6 "Mechanical couplings" is marked x for M1–M3 and N1–N3 but — for O1–O4, and that the dash is deliberate is visible from entry 7, which concerns the rear, detachable coupling on a trailer and is x for O only. The same regulation's section E point 1.1.1 a) says it in plain words: "Trailer: 12.00 m including the drawbar".

The limit of how far that EU chain carries is drawn deliberately. It is because Poland names 2021/535 that the answer follows there. A country that instead transposes directive 96/53/EC gets no help: its art. 1.1 a) covers only M2, M3, N2, N3 and their trailers in O3 and O4, so never a car with a caravan. Greece, Moldova, Ireland and Albania all mention EU law, but only those with a sentence of their own about the measurement stand in the camps; the others remain silent. One country still looks as though it belongs here but does not. Kosovo's row reads mjeti i bashkëngjitur me bigë, the towed vehicle with a drawbar — that phrase names which vehicle the twelve metres apply to, it says nothing about whether the bar counts within them, and the difference shows when you compare it with the eight above: each of them has a sentence about the measurement itself. Kosovo therefore counts among the silent, not among the camps. Switzerland measures the length without load and the height with, in two articles standing next to each other. Czechia, Slovakia and Croatia measure everything with load, Latvia writes with or without load twice in the same annex, and Slovakia and Slovenia both add that the tolerance is zero. Bulgaria goes furthest and writes the measuring method in as a reference: the dimensions are measured according to annex 2 of the type-approval regulation, with the manufacturer's own data for the specific variant and version, без да се допускат допълнителни толеранси. Greece does the reverse and writes the exception list for the width into the traffic law instead of into the figures annex — άρθρο 57 παρ. 2 enumerates tyre bulge, snow chains, folding mirrors, side marker lamps and customs seals — which is the only reason the measuring rule reaches the vehicle categories the annex leaves out at all. Serbia writes its tolerance into the technical regulation and only for the width: чл. 18 ст. 3 requires folded articulated and elastically mounted parts to fit within the maximum width, while other parts must fit within the maximum width increased by a permitted deviation of at most 1 % — two and a half centimetres on 2.55, and nothing at all on height or length. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only country in the material that puts the whole measuring method into a standard and merely refers there: length, width and height are measured according to BAS ISO 612 definitions 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3, with an exception list per dimension. That also gives the only height rule in the document concerned with the vehicle's capability rather than its dimensions: чл. 7 ст. (3) requires the effect of a system that can change the height via the axles, such as air suspension, to be taken into account — which means an air-suspended motorhome must stay under four metres in its highest position too, not only in driving position. Romania is the only country in the material that writes out tolerances for all three dimensions, and does so in the most unexpected place: in the penalty scale. Art. 61 alin. (1) lit. b) point (iii) of OG 43/1997 says that if the length is exceeded by at most 1 %, the width by at most 2 % or the height by at most 1.0 cm, then no additional charge is levied, no AST is issued and no sanction is applied. That is the exact opposite of Slovakia's and Slovenia's express zero tolerance and of Bulgaria's без да се допускат допълнителни толеранси — the same four metres of height means in practice 4.01 in Romania and exactly 4.00 in Bulgaria. A comparison table of figures hides that difference, which is one reason the wordings stand in every section above and not only the result.

The dimension guard: how the table above reaches the driver

Eleven rounds of reading lay until now only as text on this page. The app asked for the outfit's height, length and weight and did nothing with the answer, deliberately: neither Valhalla nor OSRM routes by dimensions, and a filled-in height field that looks like a routing constraint without being one is exactly the false positive the rest of the site exists to avoid.

But comparing a saved figure against a country's legal limit requires no routing at all. The dimension guard is built directly from the table above, row by row: each country gets its six cells word for word plus the figures the app can compare against — the width in two columns, the height, the caravan length, the motorhome length and the outfit length. That is 215 of the table's 240 figures, plus a seventh field that Hungary's split height cell gives rise to. The twenty-five that do not become a figure are the cells saying —, none, per road or not applicable, and they should not become a figure; see the paragraph on empty cells below. The form's sixth field, the weight, has no comparison figure and will not be given one — the reason stands under The weight. The build fails automatically if the app's figures have drifted from the table here, the same device the country pages already use. This page is the original; what the app carries is an impression.

The decisions in the translation are worth writing out, since they are all about not saying more than the material carries:

A split cell normally gives the lower figure, since the lower binds when both figures apply to the same vehicle. The rule remains for future rows, but both split cells in the table are today exceptions to it, and for two different reasons.

The first reason: the figures apply to different vehicles. Hungary's 4.00 / 3.00 is not two limits for the same outfit but one limit each — 5. § (2) gives 3.00 m to a személygépkocsi pótkocsija, a car's trailer, and 4.00 m to egyéb jármű, everything else. A motorhome is a lakóautó, category M, so "everything else". Put the lower figure in the general cell and the app warned about every motorhome over 3.00 m at the Hungarian border, against a limit that does not apply to it — and it did, in two versions, without a single test assertion turning red. The general cell therefore gets 4.00, and the three metres lie in a table of their own that only the caravan vehicle choice meets. It is set for Hungary and empty for every other country.

The second reason: the figures are alternatives. Albania's 6.50 / 8.00 looks the same and means a third thing: 6.50 m with one axle, 8.00 m with two. Which applies is decided by the caravan, and the form does not ask for the number of axles. The lower figure would have made every two-axle caravan over 6.50 m an offence it does not commit, so Albania's caravan cell gets the higher figure instead — the limit above which the caravan is too long whatever its axles. The exception is noted country by country, not as a general rule about split cells, since the difference lies in what the statute says and not in how the cell looks.

The field takes the caravan's total length, and the uncertainty is placed in the comparison. The drawbar is the A-shaped beam between the caravan's front and the coupling to the car's towball — the caravan's own part, not the car's. A caravan therefore has two lengths: the body length and the total length with the bar. The difference is not a rounding. Fendt Tendenza 465, 550 and 650 differ by 1.14, 1.15 and 1.14 m between their two figures, Hobby 380 TB and 490 KMF by 1.19 and 1.20, Kabe Estate 520 XL and Imperial 600 by 1.30 each, a British Dalesman by 0.90.

The countries do not measure alike. Eight count the bar in in their figure: Albania, France, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Poland and Serbia. Two count it out: the United Kingdom and Finland. Twenty-eight say nothing — including Kosovo, which has a row that at first reading looks like an answer but is not; the reason stands in the paragraph on measurement above. Each article of law is noted with its country and follows into the app as one of three verdicts: with bar, without bar, or no verdict at all.

The question then becomes which of the caravan's two figures the form should ask for, and the answer follows from who is to answer it. The total length is on the registration document. The body length is not — it is in the brochure, if the caravan is new enough to have one. A field asking for the body asks for the one caravan dimension an owner does not have to hand, and whoever guesses writes the total length in the box. Then the app warns on a figure that is a metre too large, in precisely the United Kingdom, which with its seven metres is the whole reason the field exists. The false alarm would have hit exactly the country the guard was built for.

So the field takes the total length and the difference is handled at the comparison. Against a country that counts the bar in, the figure is compared straight off. Against a country that counts it out — and against a country that is silent — DRAGSTANG = 1.5 m is added to the limit before it is tested, so that a warning means the body is over the limit whatever the bar's length. The United Kingdom therefore warns first at 8.5 m total, but writes out the law's 7 m, because that is the figure that applies.

That 1.5 m is safe follows from the errors costing differently. Too high a figure costs only silence, too low costs a false alarm — and 1.5 lies above every measured bar in the paragraph above. The price is a theoretical silent zone: a caravan with a total length between 12.0 and 13.5 m in a silent country can be illegal without the app saying anything. That caravan does not exist. Thirty-three of thirty-five caravan figures are 12.0 or 12.5 — the other two are the United Kingdom's 7 and Albania's 8, both far below the zone — and a caravan behind a car does not reach there.

The gain into the bargain is that the eight countries counting the bar in are now compared properly instead of systematically leniently. Kabe Imperial 600 (body 6.87, total 8.17) is silent in the United Kingdom, where it is legal, and warns in Albania, where 8.00 m includes the bar and the caravan is therefore too long.

A cell without a figure gives no comparison. —, none, per road and not applicable mean four different things and all four are correct answers to the question. Were any of them to become a zero, the app would warn about every outfit in nine countries: the height lacks a figure in Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom and France, the outfit length in Belgium, Lithuania, Slovenia, North Macedonia and Türkiye, and Norway lacks both. A warning that is always visible is the same as no warning. The dimension guard is therefore test-run against the real table before every build, and most of the tests are about the silence, not about the warning.

The caravan cell is moreover compared only when the vehicle choice is caravan. The column measures a towed vehicle — the United Kingdom's seven metres are about a trailer drawn by a motor car, Albania's figures about rimorkiove kamp — and an eight-metre motorhome breaks neither of them.

The motorhome's own length is not unretrieved, however, which this paragraph previously claimed. Twenty-five of forty country pages already carry it, as a side effect of the dimension standing beside the others in the same annex: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Croatia, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom, Czechia, Türkiye, Germany, Belarus and Austria. Four of them — Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia — write expressly about the motorhome; the others set the figure for motor vehicles in general, which a motorhome is.

That list has been recounted, and the first count was wrong in both directions. It was built on what the table rows were called instead of on what the rules cover. In one direction Norway was included, which sets no figure at all but length per road class. In the other direction eight countries fell away whose row stands under the heading "Length, caravan" even though the article beneath it covers both vehicles: Czechia's jednotlivé vozidlo, Slovakia's M1, N, O, Croatia's motornog vozila, osim autobusa, Kosovo's mjetet, përveç autobusëve, and the same thing in Germany, Belarus, Türkiye and North Macedonia. A heading is not an article of law, and the count must be made on the text beneath it.

What the twenty-four say is almost unanimously 12.00 m. Only two deviate: Finland gives 13.00 m and Albania 8.00 m. That figure is the whole point. A private motorhome never reaches twelve metres, but an 8.5 m integrated A-class is common, and in Albania it would be too long. The motorhome column therefore has exactly the same shape as the caravan column: twenty-three inert figures and one that means something.

The thirteen that were missing have been retrieved, and the column is built. The choice lay between retrieving them and introducing a marker of our own for unretrieved, since the table has no cell distinguishing retrieved and no figure exists from not retrieved. Filling thirteen cells with — would have been to claim thirteen readings we had not made. It was retrieved instead, and so no fourth kind of sentinel is needed: the three that existed sufficed, because the answers happened to fit in them.

Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, Switzerland and Hungary all give 12.00 m, from the same sort of catch-all entry: véhicules à moteur, et motordrevet køretøj, M ja N kategooria sõiduk, a mechanically propelled vehicle, mehāniskajiem transportlīdzekļiem, un véhicule automoteur, veículos a motor de dois ou mais eixos, Motorwagen ausgenommen Gesellschaftswagen, egyéb jármű. Four of the thirteen answer something else, and all four are answers of a kind the table already recognised:

• **Lithuania and Slovenia: not applicable.** Both except M1 from the whole instrument — Slovenia by the category letter, Lithuania by seats ("except those having no more than 8 seats for passengers and 1 for the driver"). A motorhome has both a driver's seat and passenger seats and therefore falls within the exception, unlike the caravan, which has no seats at all and is therefore caught by the caravan cell in the same annex. The same instrument, the opposite outcome, depending on which of the two vehicles is measured.
• **Ukraine: none.** The length table in п. 22.5 a) has four rows, and they name vehicle types: lorry 12, автопоїзд 22, tractor unit with semi-trailer 18.75, articulated vehicle 18.75. Neither a trailer on its own nor a motor vehicle that is not a lorry is included. Only the outfit has a figure.
• Sweden: 24.0 m, and it is the same sentence that gives the vehicle combination its figure. 4 kap. 17 § measures "a motor-driven vehicle other than a bus with or without a vehicle coupled to it". Sweden never splits the dimension, and is therefore the only country in the material that does not set twelve metres on a motorhome.

And Slovenia carried the same error as Sweden, for a different reason. The caravan cell stood at 12.00 m with Priloga I 1.1 as the article, and the row there reads - priklopnik 12,00 m. But priklopnik is defined in 4. člen as a trailer konstruirano in opremljeno za prevoz blaga — built and equipped for the transport of goods. That is exactly the definition the country page already used to empty the outfit cell, and it cannot apply on one row and not on the other. The cell now says none. The width and the height stand: 1.2 c) reads vsa ostala vozila and 1.3 za vsa vozila, catch-all entries without a goods word, and 2. člen (1) brings priklopnih vozil kategorij O into the scope. A caravan is O. The same instrument therefore gives the caravan a width figure and a height figure but no length figure, and it is the difference in wording from row to row that decides, not the vehicle.

And one row was corrected before that. Sweden's caravan cell previously carried 12.0 m with 4 kap. 17 § as the article. That figure exists in the trafikförordning but never as a limit: six occurrences of "12,0 meter", three in 17 § and three identical in 17 f §, all as conditions for the exceptions permitting 25.25 and 34.5 metres respectively. The expression longer than … metres occurs exactly once in the whole instrument, and it is the 24.0 metres. Sweden therefore has no general length limit for an individual trailer, and the cell now says none. The error was not harmless: with 12.0 and vagn_drag unset the guard fired at 13.5 m total length, that is, a warning in Sweden for an outfit Swedish law has no opinion about. That is precisely the kind of false trigger the whole guard is built to avoid, and it sat in our own table.

How the column is used. The length field in the form measures the whole outfit when there is one, and the vehicle alone when there is not. The guard therefore switches comparison figure with the vehicle choice: if the choice is motorhome the length is measured against the motorhome cell, otherwise against the outfit cell. A motorhome on its own is not a vehicle combination, and to measure it against 18.75 would be to borrow a rule about something else. The column is however not used for the choices car and motorcycle. The reason is Albania: the 8.00 metres stand in neni 61.3, which is about autokampe, while Albania's general figure for an individual vehicle is 12 m in 61.1. Put the motorhome cell on a car and the app would warn about an 8.5 m car in Albania — a false trigger from a rule that does not apply to it. The four cells without a figure — Lithuania, Slovenia, Ukraine and Norway — mean the app is silent about motorhome length there, which is the right direction to err in.

The sign is shown when the navigation takes the outfit across a national border, and also at the first position: someone starting in Hungary with a 3.10 m high caravan has not crossed a border but stands just as wrongly for that. Red is reserved for a dimension breach. Blue still says "new country, new speed"; red says "the outfit may not be here", and the two verdicts must not look alike.

The guard compares against Albania's repealed figures, and that is a choice. Since 2026-08-06 neni 61 gives no figures at all but points to a regulation not yet adopted (see footnote † under the table). The app nevertheless still compares against Albania's height, caravan length, outfit length and measuring method from the version in force up to 2026-08-05, without a marker: † sits on the country name in the table and does not follow into the figures. The reason is that the alternative is worse: zero the row and the app falls silent in the one country whose caravan figures a car-drawn caravan can actually break, and silence would be to claim that nothing applies. What we know is that figures of 6.50/8.00 m applied until the day before yesterday and that nothing has replaced them. Comparing against the last version that had effect is therefore the closest to an answer the material carries — but it is an assumption that the authority's practice follows the repealed text, not a reading of the law in force, and that difference must be visible here. The row is to be replaced as soon as the regulation is published.

Outside the guard remains everything that cannot be written as a figure: Albania's height rule of 1.8 times the caravan's smallest track width, Switzerland's different measuring methods for height and length, Romania's tolerances in the penalty scale and Bosnia and Herzegovina's requirement that the air suspension's highest position be counted. The table and the wordings above are still what applies — the guard catches only the subset that is comparable, and says nothing about the rest.

The width

The width was for a long time the only dimension with two filled columns and no field to fill in. The reason given was that it has converged: 2.55 m stands on almost every row, and a field that almost never says anything is a field mostly in the way. The reason did not hold on closer inspection, and the decision rests on a single row.

Ireland sets 2.50 m on both columns, throughout, without any exception a car can reach. At the same time a very large share of Europe's caravans are exactly 2.50 m wide, and the most expensive 2.55 — it already stands on Ireland's country page. The difference between the two is five centimetres and one of them is illegal on an Irish public road. A Swedish owner, accustomed to 2.60 at home, has no way of guessing that. It is exactly the false negative the guard exists for: a figure that is legal in the country of departure and illegal on the other side of the border, without anything on the way saying so. The span is ten centimetres, from Ireland's 2.50 to the 2.60 that Sweden, Finland and Ukraine give the trailer, and ten centimetres is enough when the outfit is built to the millimetre.

Two columns become two fields in the JSON file and one field in the form. bredd is the car column and meets the vehicle choice motorhome; bredd_vagn is the trailer column and meets caravan. The choice of letting the caravan meet the trailer column and not the lower of the two follows from where the outfit's widest point sits: almost always on the caravan. The towing vehicle is a car and rarely reaches even 2.0 m across the body. To compare the outfit's widest point against the car column would be to test the caravan against a rule written for the car.

That has a consequence that looks back to front but is right. Lithuania and Slovenia except M1 from the whole instrument, the same exception that already emptied their motorhome cell. Their car column therefore says not applicable and their trailer column 2.55. A motorhome meets nothing there and the guard is silent; a caravan meets 2.55 and can be warned. The same instrument, the opposite outcome, depending on which of the two vehicles is measured — exactly the same pattern the length showed.

Andorra is silent on both. The law leaves the width to the sign, as it leaves the height, and a cell without a figure gives no comparison.

Germany's 2.50 is the one row we have not been able to read to the end, and it is resolved in the direction of silence. StVZO § 32 Abs. 1 gives 2.55 m in Nr. 1 allgemein and 2.50 m in Nr. 5 bei Personenkraftwagen. The paragraph does not define Personenkraftwagen. The definition closest to hand, PBefG § 4 Abs. 4 Nr. 1, is expressly written "im Sinne dieses Gesetzes" and therefore does not reach into the StVZO. Whether a motorhome is a Personenkraftwagen in the StVZO's sense is thus a classification question to which we have no primary answer. Instead of guessing, the figure chosen is the one that binds under both readings: the car column gets 2.55 as a written-out exception with the reason noted on the spot. The price is silence in the span 2.50–2.55 for a motorhome in Germany; the gain is that nobody is warned about something that may be perfectly legal. The table cell stands untouched with 2.50 and its article, since the wiki must say what the law says and the exception belongs in the translation. The caravan is not affected at all: it is an Anhänger and gets 2.55 under any reading.

The field asks for the outfit's widest fixed point. Mirrors and extended awnings are not counted in. We have not read any measuring provision of the drawbar kind for the width in any of the forty countries, and that ignorance lies in the right direction: a figure that leaves out the mirrors is too small, and a figure that is too small gives silence. Were it the other way round — that we asked for the mirrors' width and compared against a limit written for the body — every outfit near the limit would have had a false alarm.

Sixteen of the test runs concern the width, and most of them are about the silence: that an unfilled field never warns in any of the forty countries, that every country without a width figure has a reason in plain words in its cell, that Lithuania and Slovenia are silent for a motorhome but not for a caravan, and that Germany is silent at 2.52 but not at 2.60.

The weight

The weight field is collected, saved and displayed — and never compared. That is a settled answer and not a half-finished one, and it should be written down somewhere, since a field that alone can never warn otherwise looks like a forgotten field.

None of the forty statutes sets a weight limit that binds a private outfit at a border crossing. Three reasons, any one of which would have sufficed:

• The weight rows in the dimension annexes measure goods vehicles. Where the annexes carry weights at all, they stand in the same enumerations that have already turned out to be about товарно моторно возило, véhicules à moteur, goods trailers and vehicle combinations in commercial traffic. It is the same misreading that once put Hungary's 3.00 m in the general cell, and it is more expensive on the weight, since every outfit has a weight to compare with.
• The 3,500 kg limit is a licence limit, not a national one. It decides what entitlement B covers — see the table of licence limits — and the entitlement is decided by what the driver has in their wallet, not by which side of the border the outfit stands on. A Swedish B licence applies the same way in Poland as at home. A guard whose whole business is the difference between countries has nothing to say about a figure that is the same in all of them, and to warn at a border about something that already applied on the driveway would be a false alarm about place.
• The towing capacity is on the registration document, not in any national instrument. What this particular car may tow is a property of the vehicle and follows it across the border unchanged. There is no country dependence there at all.

One genuine connection remains, and it belongs in a different table. Above 3,500 kg the outfit changes speed class in several countries: the Netherlands lowers the motorway from 90 to 80 when the trailer weighs more, Switzerland loses its 100 km/h, France lets R413-8 bite only above 3.5 tonnes, Belgium lowers the motorway to 90 and Slovenia lowers to 80 only for towing vehicles over 3.5 t. That is a speed question, and it belongs to the speed table, not to the dimension guard. To put it in the dimension guard would be to answer the wrong question with the right figure.

The field therefore stays, for two reasons. The weight is worth having written down for the driver's own sake, and matt_note now says outright in all eleven languages that it is only displayed. And should the material one day yield a country-varying weight limit that actually binds a private outfit, the field, the saving and the sign are already in place: what is missing is a column in the table above, not code.

The rules on the road: the same comparison before the journey

The guard above speaks at the border. That is late. Someone who learns that caravans are prohibited in Monaco when the outfit is already on Boulevard du Larvotto has only one choice left, and that is to turn round. The same comparison can be made while the journey is still a plan, and there it is worth something entirely different.

The trip plan therefore works out which countries the route passes through and lists them under the timeline, in the order you drive into them. The route geometry is thinned to one point per half kilometre before each point is looked up in the zone layer; the first and last point of each leg are always tested, since that is where the start, the destination and every intermediate stop lie. Half a kilometre was chosen after the country most expensive to miss rather than the most common one: Monaco is about two kilometres wide and prohibits caravans entirely.

Each country in the list carries three things, and all three are taken from material that already existed:

• The country's name as a link to /rules/<country code>/, that is, this wiki's country page, where every figure stands with its article of law and the date it was read.
• The speed limit, but only for the caravan vehicle choice — the figure in the zone layer applies to a caravan, and to show it for a motorhome would be to show a figure about something else.
• The dimension verdicts from mattBrott, that is, exactly the same comparison as at the border and with the same rule of silence: a country without a read figure gives no verdict. Here, however, they are shown for all vehicle choices, not only the caravan. The table above has carried the motorhome's length and width all along; until now there was no route for those figures to reach a motorhome driver.

That a row is drawn at all depends on the country having dimensions retrieved. That is not a shortcut but the proof: the same forty-four country codes stand in the dimension table, in the map's zone layer and as rule pages here in the wiki, and the build fails if the three sets differ by a single code. So a row can never point to a page that does not exist, and no country can silently fall out of the list because one of the three has drifted from the others.

Where the guard sees nothing

Forty countries have been read, but the guard does not meet countries — it meets points on a map. The guard looks the position up in the map's zone layer, gets a country code, and only then fetches the dimension limits. No code, no comparison. The map is therefore a silent precondition for the whole table above, and it deserves to be measured as carefully as the statutes.

There are two ways to be wrong, and they are not interchangeable:

It is the same asymmetry that governs everything else on this page. Silence costs a missing warning; the wrong country costs a false positive, and a false positive is worse because it looks right.

What the measurement showed

The map was long built from Natural Earth 110m. To know what that cost, 10m was fetched as an independent yardstick — a ten times finer contour, never delivered, only used as a judge — and 40,000 random land points between 11° W and 41° E, 34° N and 71° N were looked up in both:

The coarse map therefore placed one sixtieth of Europe's land area in the wrong country. The largest was Norway, whose coast at 110m is a straight line cutting in over Swedish and Finnish ground; then Bosnia against Croatia, Moldova against Ukraine and France against Switzerland. These are not margins in the wilderness — they are border country you drive through.

Why both layers lie in the file

50m alone would have been insufficient in an unexpected way. A finer coastline also cuts away land that the coarse contour happened to sweep over, and that is where the port cities end up in the water: Stockholm, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Venice, Split, Dubrovnik, Esbjerg and Narvik all went silent with 50m alone, though 110m answered correctly for them. Silence is the right direction to err in, but not in a capital city — the sign would show – in the middle of Stockholm and look broken.

The solution required no new code, only the right order. The zone lookup takes the first matching polygon, so both layers lie in the same map with the fine one first. 50m decides everything it covers; 110m answers only where 50m is silent, that is, over water and in harbour basins. The silence is halved without buying back the misattribution — 0.23 against 0.22 per cent, three points out of 40,000.

The price is the file size, 249 KiB against 27 (84 against 8 gzipped), and 15,637 points against 1,458. The zone lookup therefore got a bounding box per ring and not only per country: Norway is a couple of hundred rings in a box that holds Svalbard, and without the ring box every point in that box would be threaded through all the contours. With it a lookup costs 2.2 µs in node against 5.4 without. A route looks up a few thousand segments; that is tenths of a millisecond.

The four that could not fall silent by themselves

Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City and Gibraltar lie entirely inside a neighbour's outer contour. They therefore cannot fall silent by being absent — the neighbour's polygon answers for them, and did: French figures in Monaco, Spanish in Gibraltar, Italian in the other two. In Monaco that answer was most wrong of all: the French area said 90 km/h where a caravan may not drive at all.

They all have an area of their own, taken from 10m. As long as one of them lacked a read statute it carried zero as its cap figure and no row in the dimension table. Zero means no cap: the route keeps the engine's own road speeds, the dimension guard finds no row and says nothing, and the navigation writes the country's name with ? where the figure would have stood. Silence with a name on it, instead of a figure without cover. The construction remains and the build still fails if a figure turns up for a country marked as silent — but that list has been empty since 2026-08-10.

All four got out on the same day, 2026-08-10. Gibraltar first: three instruments read in their version in force — Traffic Act 2005-26, Vehicles (Construction, Equipment and Maintenance) Regulations and Control of Traffic Regulations — which gave both a dimension row and a speed figure. The figure is 35 km/h, the lowest outfit figure in the whole material by a wide margin.

Then Monaco: Code de la route in the version of 2026-07-04 and Arrêté municipal n° 2007-256 in the version of 2022-11-12. There the reading gave 70 km/h — the law's highest permitted figure, since article 11 sets 50 as the general rule and lets the sign raise it to 70, and no rule of its own exists for a trailer or an outfit. It also gave the material's only outright prohibition: a caravan may not be driven in Monaco at all.

Then San Marino, and the longest chain in the whole material. The Codice della strada (Decreto Delegato 26 maggio 2008 n.81, consolidation aggiornato al 19 gennaio 2024) contains not a single dimension; article 54 points on to Legge 20 settembre 1985 n.108, whose article 15 has been rewritten four times — 1994, 1996 and twice in 2004. The row is the fourth version. The speed, however, stood in the code itself: article 37 sets 70 km/h su tutta la rete stradale del territorio della Repubblica, a single figure for the whole country, and lets the sign only lower it.

Last Vatican City, which was hardest precisely because there was nothing to read. The Governorate's entire published material has been gone through serial number by serial number without a single traffic norm. The way out went instead through Legge N. LXXI del 1 ottobre 2008 sulle fonti del diritto, whose article 12 lets Italian law on "gli automobili e la loro circolazione" apply in the state directly — but frozen to the version of 1 January 2009. That version has been fetched separately and compared cell by cell with today's: identical in all six. The figure is 70 km/h, the ceiling whether one reads the built-up-area rule or the outfit rule, since the state is 0.44 km² within walls and has neither an autostrada nor a strada extraurbana.

The generator therefore now distinguishes ENKLAV, the four that need an area of their own, from TYST, those still lacking a read statute. The way out of TYST goes through the statute and nowhere else, and all four have taken it. TYST is empty but remains: the next country to get an area before it gets a statute must be able to fall silent on the same terms.

What is still silent

Countries with no area at all. Malta, Cyprus, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Åland, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, Russia with Kaliningrad, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. None of them has been read, and none of them lies inside a neighbour — the silence is therefore both correct and complete. Ceuta and Melilla fall outside for the same reason even though they are Spanish: the map source assigns them to Africa.

Ferry berths. A ferry berth lies by definition at the outer edge of the coastline, that is, precisely where a polygon is least reliable. Dover, Folkestone, Gedser, Hirtshals, Kapellskär, Nynäshamn and Kalmar fall outside both layers. The consequence is that whoever rolls off a ferry drives for a while without a cap, and that the country-change verdict comes some way inland instead of on the quay. That is the acceptable direction of error, but it is worth knowing that it is systematic precisely where the journey begins.

Border country, the remaining 0.23 per cent. What remains is a thin strip along the border lines themselves where 50m and 10m do not agree on where the line runs — six points out of 40,000 of Swedish land called Norwegian, four of Belarusian called Ukrainian. It cannot be built away with a polygon test; a finer contour only moves which points are wrong. To drive over a border and get the new country's verdict a few hundred metres too early or too late is not the same as getting the wrong country's figures in the middle of a country, and it is that difference that makes the rest acceptable.