Why More Trucks and Trailers Are Starting Their Journeys With Air-Weigh Scales On-Board

Installation in Factories, PDIs and ModCenters Jumps 50 Percent

The number of Air-Weigh scales being installed on vehicles in a factory, PDI or ModCenter has increased recently by 50 percent. And now we are seeing more OEMs adding additional tools and capabilities to install Air-Weigh on all suspensions, whether they are air or mechanical.

It’s not hard for us to understand why. But we would like to tell you about it.

For 36 years our onboard scales have protected trucking companies from overloading their trucks, while saving time on the road and improving performance and profitability. And while Air-Weigh scales are very plausible as a retrofit, and well worth the time and expense to be added on an aftermarket basis, their value as original factory installation is off the charts.

Air-Weigh has worked closely with the OEM factories, OEM PDI centers and independent modification centers to make it possible to produce thousands of vehicles with the on-board scale ready to use.

By contrast, a retrofit takes two-to-four hours. So if you start with a fleet of 10,000 trucks, it would take at least three years to retrofit all of them with Air-Weigh scales. The retrofit is very plausible for small owner-operators or for smaller fleets. But for a fleet with thousands of tractor/trailers, we realize they are never going to do all that retrofitting.

Yet that doesn’t mean there’s no way for major fleets to become Air-Weigh fleets. Every fleet has trade cycles for their trucks and trailers, and as they go back to their dealers for new vehicles, they can spec an Air-Weigh on-board scale as a must-have.

And because of the way we work so closely with OEMs, there are many excellent opportunities. Whether it’s a large tractor or any other configuration, we have a scale that will fit it.

Also, because we can do mechanical suspensions as well as air suspensions, we can work with dump trucks, straight trucks or any other vehicle with a mechanical suspension.

That means any fleet that purchases new vehicles can speak to its dealer and indicate it wants Air-Weigh scales on any new model the fleet purchases.

The dealers have all the information on our products and can easily fill this request. So any fleet owner that wants to start transitioning to on-board scales can do so by specifying Air-Weigh scales to its dealer.

Just consider the benefits of an Air-Weigh On-Board Scale:

• The time saved having to weigh a load before leaving for a trip.
• The improved margins from knowing your weight precisely and not having to lighten the load (and thus the margin from the trip) just to be sure you’re not overweight.
• The improved efficiency of knowing you won’t get held up or turned back at a weigh station.
• The improved longevity of the vehicle from never having to make a trip overweight.
• The benefits of not having to make more trips than necessary as a result of running underweight.

There is no truck fleet manager in North America who doesn’t want these benefits. And if they can get them with a simple, factory-installed onboard scale – without having to absorb a prohibitive price to get it – they’re going to go for that every time.

OEMs know what their fleet customers want. That’s why Air-Weigh has made it easy to get the product installed on new vehicles – whether at the factory, at the factory-owned modification center or an independently owned modification center.

Air-Weigh is based in the United States. We build, design and sell all our scales right here. We can customize them. We have the infrastructure to support them. We have in-house technical resources and do not need to outsource.

And because we’ve been in business since 1987, the major OEMs know us well. (And we know them, too.)

You’re simply not going to get the same thing from an offshore manufacturer who exports a product to the U.S. and sticks a label on it. OEMs deserve to work with an established, U.S.-based company that designs, builds, sells and services the product.

We love when trucks and trailers roll off the factory floor with our scales onboard. Of course, it’s great for us, but it’s also great for every trucking company that will get the benefits of these excellent products.

And it’s great to see it happening more and more often, right here in the United States