
Enhancing Towing Safety and Performance with BOSS Airbag Suspension Kits
Anyone who’s ever towed a caravan, a boat, or a custom tradie trailer knows the danger of overloading their suspension. And assuming you haven’t exceeded your trailer’s GVWR (gross vehicle weight rating), your tow vehicle’s GCWR (Gross Combined Weight Rating), or your drawbar isn’t too long, it can be especially problematic if your suspension isn’t able to support its share of the load.
Make no mistake: while towing or hauling with your shocks or springs under stress isn’t the worst thing you could do, it’s more than just an unsightly inconvenience. Not only is the stress transferred to your brakes, bearings, and tyres, it can ultimately result in your steering becoming unpredictable, leading to a potentially catastrophic load shift. Fortunately, the solution for a sagging suspension is as straightforward as installing airbags on your vehicle; and not surprisingly, Australia is home to one of the auto industry’s most dominant airbag manufacturers: BOSS.
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BOSS Airbags Give Your Rear Suspension the Support it Needs

From their award-winning bag-over strut kits, to their full-fledged air management systems, BOSS air suspension systems are in a league all their own. That’s why when it comes to a tired rear suspension, a heavy-duty BOSS Extreme Series rear airbag suspension kit has everything you need to get your vehicle back on level footing. Bolt-on airbag kits do more than just allow you to compensate for failing suspension components: they give you adjustable, on-demand support that you can use to stabilize loads whose centres of gravity might otherwise make transport a challenge.
Boasting some of the strongest airbags in the industry, every BOSS Extreme rear assist airbag suspension kit starts with a pair of proprietary blended, double-blow airbags woven from cured ballistic rubber. These seamless, 1136kg per side bellows feature 9 high tensile steel support cords moulded into their central sections, and 4 cords at each bead end, giving them the steel-belted robustness they need to:
- Reduce the destructive stresses on shocks, springs, and other suspension components;
- Increase chassis-to-tyre, and chassis-to-ground clearance; and,
- Prevent load instability that could lead to reduced braking and steering control.
While rear assist airbag suspension kits can’t increase your vehicle’s GCWR or your trailer’s GVWR, they will allow you to fine-tune your suspension to counter weakened suspension components, to accommodate oversized or uneven loads, and even make driving on poor-quality roads easier. Beyond the airbags themselves, you only have to look at the full complement of hardware used on an Extreme Series rear airbag suspension kit to recognize just how reliable they are.
Heavy-Duty Hardware for Extreme Series Airbags
BOSS Extreme Series load assist airbag suspension kits are custom-engineered for a wide range of the most popular utes and 4WDs sold in Australia, and are engineered specifically to safely eliminate the chances of either it or your trailer from bottoming out. These severe duty kits are built around the most reliable load-levelling components available which, in addition to their 2272kg airbags, also consist of:
- Powder-coated, corrosion-resistant brackets;
- DOT spec, zinc-plated Schrader valves; and,
- DOT-approved, SAE J844 airlines.
Together with their stainless steel mounting and fastening hardware, Extreme Series rear assist kits install easily with basic hand tools, and without affecting your vehicle’s factory geometry. They can even be combined with one of BOSS’s premium Onboard Air Compressor Kits, giving you maximum flexibility anytime you need to fill your airbags or tyres.
Trust BOSS Airbags to Protect More than Your Suspension

While the main job of rear load assist airbags is to relieve unwanted stress on shocks and springs, it’s important to remember that they’re not the only parts that are negatively affected by persistently heavy loads. Once the deflection rates of your shocks and springs become unpredictable, the wear on other drivetrain components also increases; and if you’ve had your vehicle lifted, are running larger tyres, or don’t regularly monitor your tyre pressure, the wear rates on a host of seemingly unrelated components is going to increase dramatically.
The extent of the component wear that can occur as a result of driving with stressed suspension components can be as costly as it is significant and can include:
- Accelerated tyre wear. Even under the best of conditions, hauling unbalanced or oversized loads can accelerate tyre and wheel bearing wear, but doing so with overloaded shocks or springs will increase the rate of wear considerably.
- Erratic steering. Even a few millimetres of random shock absorber or spring travel can result in hugely uncertain steering characteristics, and the added stress placed on tie rods, drag links, and other steering components can render your vehicle uncontrollable.
- Uneven, and increased braking distances. Not only will changes in tyre wear and steering have an effect on brake wear and distances, but your effective braking power will also change, making braking equally unpredictable.
The fact is, overworking your shocks and springs is an invitation for all kinds of problems to materialize; and BOSS makes the airbag suspension kits Australia trusts to stay safe.
The Final Word
At the end of the day, if you do any type of heavy towing or hauling, rear assist airbags are one of the wisest investments you can make in reliability and safety. You want the best equipment available though, and that’s precisely what you get with BOSS.
A heavy-duty Extreme Series rear airbag suspension kit from BOSS has everything you need to shore up your vehicle’s shocks and springs, as well as protect your drivetrain and your trailer. They have everything need to tow and haul with confidence.
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