At the Mid-America Trucking Show, Hyundai Translead showed a bladder-like gasket that inflates firmly against overhead doors to keep them from shaking and rattling.

Air from the trailer's brake system fills the gasket when the driver releases the parking brake to begin traveling, then is bled out when he sets the brake before leaving the cab and approaching the trailer's rear to open the door. The van trailer itself had sheet-and-post sidewalls using two thin skins over a composite foam core; the sheets are galvanized and painted and the core is 3 millimeters wide.

Hyundai also showed an HT Duralite composite flatbed that uses aluminum flooring, crossmembers and other parts with a galvanized steel main frame, landing gear and certain other parts in the undercarriage. It weighs 10,600 pounds - not a lot more than an all-aluminum flatbed - and the pewter-colored galvanized components causes the vehicle to look almost all-aluminum.

A third Hyundai trailer on display at Mid-America was a MaxCube reefer that gained 22 cubic feet of interior volume by cutting 2.5 inches out of the ceiling and still more out of the floor. Total volume is 3,744 cubic feet, a feature valuable to carriers who haul light-density cargoes.

From the May 2011 issue of HDT.