June 15, 2016 Vol. 13 No. 12

I’m a very big proponent of spec’ing disc brakes on heavy trucks. They simply stop the vehicle sooner. Without fade when they get hot. And with a whole lot less maintenance along the way. For me this is almost no-brainer territory.

Extra expense? Yes, though only up front, yet that’s been enough to limit the air-disc take-up rate in recent years, even though the technology itself has come a very long way from the ugly early days. Nothing wrong with it now, and if your trucks can stop 80 ft sooner from highway speeds with discs, I’m not at all sure that price should really be an issue. A lot can happen in 80 ft.

Once upon a scary time I owned a Volkswagen Beetle. A very low-spec German domestic model, it was imported by a friend of mine, one of my English professors who had lived across the pond for a while. As an impecunious student, I jumped at the chance to buy it when he offered the old blue beast to me for something like a hundred bucks.

Stopping that little blue car was an adventure because my VW had rod-operated drum brakes. Really. Like a 1929 Model A, no hydraulics. Certainly no booster of any sort. Just whatever torque I could muster with my foot while praying that those four rods hadn’t rusted or gone too far out of adjustment, as they often did.

This is all top of mind because I joined SAF-Holland in Grand Rapids, MI last week for the introduction of its new P89 air disc brake series for trailers. It’s comprised of two models: the P89 and P89 Plus. The base-model P89 can be customized to suit specific fleet demands, and it will work on any axles in the company’s broad range of air and mechanical suspensions.

But the key here is its price.