Why air brakes

I wish my light duty trucks had air brakes or at least the trailers I haul with them would have them. I like the better stopping power and less trouble with air brakes compared to electric or electric over hydraulic on some of the trailers I pull when I'm not haulin grain or cattle with my Pete .

 

i agree them electric trailer break controllers suck ### you can aether set them where you don't have enough braking in a panic stop or puts your face in the windshield every time you flash the break lights.

 

Ever bust a brake line in your car? I have. Not something I'd care to see in an 80,000 pound truck. With air brakes, you can pinch off the busted line with a pair of vice grips and still have functional brakes on all of the unaffected wheels. Hydraulic brakes? Once a little air gets into the system or the fluid finds a way to escape, you've got no brakes until the line is fixed AND you bleed the air out.

Not only that, but coupling to a trailer with air brakes is easy, and it just works. Electric brakes are a "best we can do under the circumstances" because those trailers are usually pulled behind vehicles with hydraulic brakes and you can't couple into the brake lines to hook up the trailer because if ANY air got into the system you'd have to bleed it out each and every time you hooked to a new trailer...time consuming, and unless you've got the equipment to do the job yourself it is generally a 2-person operation.

Cars and light trucks don't use air brakes because they are designed for the lowest common denominator. People like "easy". They want the car to do as much for them as possible so they don't have to be bothered with actually having to know anything about the car. Whether it is an automatic transmission, power steering, park assist that will parallel park for you, lane assist and lane departure warnings, adaptive cruise control that automatically adjusts your speed with traffic, and now cars that will stop for you if something is in your way. There's also traction control and anti-lock brakes so you don't have to worry about how much pressure you apply to the pedals either. Do you think the people all of those systems were designed for are going to want to have an air pressure gauge to keep an eye on? Or worry about slack adjusters wearing out, diaphragms cracking/rupturing, not to mention all of the extra grease fittings air brakes add to a vehicle.

 

One other thing not mentioned as why we have air brakes and not hydraulic brakes. Aside from other items mentioned before hydraulic brakes rely on brake fluid which has a boiling point and its also hydroscopic so it absorbs moisture out of the atmosphere. And if the the fluid isn't flushed yearly or at least every2 years the boiling point is lowered substantially. And if you tried to stop a fully loaded trk with hydraulic brakes you would boil the fluid and have no brakes.

 

all school buses are air brakes now the only way you can get hydraulic brakes is by special order. and that presents a problem, a lot of school bus drivers cant pass the air brake test to get there endorsement,thus making it even harder to get drivers. that being said the air brakes are by far better brakes than the old hydraulic ones. b safe out there

 

They tried hydros on big rigs and it went bad and caused alot of deaths due to failure.