Meritor, Inc. has announced various products have been selected as standard position and as preferred options on all WabashNational Corp. dry and refrigerated van trailer products, further strengthening Meritor’s position as a leading supplier to the trailer industry.
The recently signed three-year agreement takes effect Jan. 1, 2019, and positions Meritor’s loose axles as standard equipment designed to reduce weight and offer structural advantages − contributing to improved fleet productivity through increased fuel efficiency and payload capacity. The Meritor Tire Inflation System (MTIS) has also been selected as the preferred automatic tire inflation system. Meritor air disc brakes, along with the Meritor Trailing-Arm (MTA) suspension, hubs, drums and slack adjusters, and Meritor’s new MTec6™ large-diameter axle, which provides a 40-pound weight savings to a standard axle, are optional in all Wabash configurations.
“We greatly value Wabash as a long-term customer,” said Dave Pritchard, general manager, Trailer for Meritor. “We appreciate Wabash selecting Meritor for this important business and look forward to beginning this new phase of our relationship.”
For more than 30 years, Meritor has supplied a variety of trailer axle and braking systems to Wabash, one of the industry’s largest manufacturers of trailers for traditional van and vocational configurations across multiple applications. Meritor has engineered and manufactured groundbreaking trailer suspensions, axles and brakes for over 60 years, building more than 10 million trailer axles that incorporate features to improve quality, extend life and reduce maintenance, all delivered within standard lead-times.
More than 8 million fleet tires are currently protected by MTIS. Almost one in every three trailers built today is specified with the tire inflation system. According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) studies, tire inflation systems extend tire life by 10 percent and increase fuel economy an average 1.4 percent. MTIS also decreases maintenance costs due to longer intervals between retreads and less time spent on manual pressure checking and filling.
