Dry van - Air ride or Spring ?

Nope. All the big dry van fleets run mostly spring ride trailers. The spring is made of a composite material now a single leaf. Instead of spring steel leaves layered like in the old days. The reason they do this is air ride equals more maintenance and higher cost.

But for a 1 truck guy running a trailer for 10 years you're looking at maybe replacing an air bag or two. Not that big of a deal cost wise. Now when you have 30,000 air ride van trailers then it's a lot of savings never having fix air leaks or replacing air bags going with spring ride.

I would never even consider a spring ride trailer bouncing and beating me to death with all the empty miles I run. Not to mention light weight loads.

 

We run local and have spring ride. Old spring ride from what @rollin coal said.

We have no trougle finding and keeping frieght. We all everything and anything thst can go in a dry van.
Glass bottles
Beer
Pretzels
Glass balls
Everything dry, we do.

We use spring ride yet because our main commodity cuts the trailer life in half. What we haul beats a trailer so bad, new look like theyre 3 or 5 years old. But we run the #### outta them. Have some trailers that are 15 years old. Thank god they are few and fewer....

 

I've never had things to pick up after I deliver. As someone else mentioned, Most of the bigger companies use spring ride. Not a big deal at all. I've loaded plenty of all kinds of freight, and have had no issues.

 

Glass balls? What sport are those used for?

 

A company uses them and makes glass products. I guess they heat the balls and blow glass.

 

Like plastic pellets that get made into other plastic products, but in glass format.
I understand now

 

Spring Ride Suspension vs. Air Ride Suspension: What's the Difference? | Schneider

 

Strange that Schneider's tests give the result the beancounters wanted.

 

Go with an air-ride dry van, there is not much difference in maintenance air vs spring, and as far as statistics out of the approx. 25 loads I book a week 3-4 of them will specifically ask for an Air-Ride trailer.