Video Transcript for Brads Honest 6 Month Review - Air Lift AirLift 1000 Air Helper Springs

This is my 2010 Toyota Sienna and this is my daily driver, I use it for a bunch of different stuff. One of the cool things about being in etrailer is I'm able to use a lot of our products out in the wild and that can be a bike rack, a cargo carrier, or a roof box, or even pulling a trailer. And on normal vehicles that, you know, you're hooking things up to a hitch, you may not notice the sag that can occur. But I'm here to tell you, when you have things extended past, you know, the length of the vehicle, it starts to squat down, and a minivan is definitely one that shows that. If you ever see someone loaded down on a road trip with a roof box and cargo carrier, that van's gonna be squatted. And that was something that I wanted to fix immediately with this van.

And I had the chance to do that with Air Lift 1000 light duty slip in bags. And it's kind of one of those that I looked at the product and I didn't really know what it would do. But here on my own van, I have them on here, I've had them on here for six months and I'm not taking them off, they are phenomenal, just from a daily driving standpoint as well as when things get heavy. The basic concept is these will slip in where your springs are gonna be located, inside of them. And then when you run air to the fitting, it's gonna fill these bags up.

Now you're probably thinking of the convoluted style where it's brackets that bolts up to the frame, those are really good for people that haul with trucks all the time with varying loads, you can adjust that out. And this is kind of similar, it's a light duty version of it. So pressure wise, you can only go up to 35 PSI in these with a minimum of five, but really it makes a world of difference. The first time I put these in was right before our vacation, I slipped these in and I showed Ian, who's a fellow installer who also drives a Toyota Sienna, you know, how easy it was to do, and we took it out for a quick ride and he was blown away. All right, so we'll take off here, I'm gonna head over to our bumps course.

Even just hitting this corner here, I'm not feeling the same amount of roll in the body that we would in my van, so definitely impressed with that. Now we'll go over the bumps course here, I'm gonna start kind of slow. Yeah, it's already a night and day difference. I will say one thing specifically that I notice even now going this slow over the bumps course is the rear of the vehicle. I'm not getting as much jounce or rebound out of the rear end, with mine, it really seems like it's getting as close to bottoming out as it can, even on these smaller bumps.

Yeah, so even the handling, as far as cornering, it just feels great, it feels more secure. It's keeping me upright. And one of my wife's biggest complaints is she gets carsick from the vehicle jostling around too much. So I feel like even with the upgrades, it would just help keep her from saying anything on those road trips as well. We do pretty long road trips out cross country just to go see family multiple times a year. So I'm thinking these upgrades need to happen sooner rather than later. Having the same vehicle seeing a kind of comparison really sends the picture home. I've had these on here for six months, so I'm kind of used to it at this point. But ease of installation, kind of, they're a little tricky, you do have to squeeze them into the bag and you wanna raise your suspension up, no cutting or drilling required. Once you get them slipped in, you route these air lines to the back to a fitting, wherever you wanna fill it up. You don't need a compressor. If you have an air compressor, cool, you can fill that up, but you don't need onboard air, you can stop at any place that you'd fill your tires with and get that air pressure adjusted. I actually use my bike pump that I keep in the back anyway and I am able to fill these bags up pretty quickly. So it really shows, over bumps, just normal driving unloaded, just me in the car, it really absorbs a lot of that initial bump. And the reason being is this is kind of cushioning, it goes in between the coils, it's really gonna cushion all of that quick impact and takes the strain off the shock so they can really do their job. And that really plays into a little bit more when you do have weight, not only is it gonna be more comfortable overall with these daily driving, but when you put that car carrier, bike rack, roof rack, or even just passengers in your van or your vehicle, that's when you really start to notice the sag. So most vehicles now are designed with comfort in mind and I get that, but the flip side is, is when you start putting accessories or start towing, that's when the suspension gets a little bit saggy and it doesn't make for a great feeling of driving down the road and it's also gonna wear out your suspension. Now when it comes to the adjustability, that's something that I really like about this as well. Normal driving, I actually keep these at 20 PSI 'cause it does better than what it did from the factory. But when I wanna tow, take my bike pump, raise this up to 35 and it can handle that load. Now I've driven around with it with nothing loaded at 35, it's a little harsh, not bad by any means, but it's pretty stiff in the rear. If you like a stiffer suspension, you can do that. But I like it to have a little bit of feel from it still, but not super stiff when I don't have anything on here, so I found that happy medium, so really easy to just adjust that. Now when fully inflated, you are gonna get some extra clearance too, which transitions into having more ground clearance, which is really nice. Recently, on a work trip, I had a kayak trailer behind me that I was hauling and as we went up a hill, the van was getting close to kind of bottoming out, but that little extra clearance made a world of difference, so something to think about. You know, having that little extra clearance should help overall in any scenario when you're towing. And just to show you the difference, I'm gonna bleed out our Schrader valve real time here so you can see it aired out. (air hissing) And the suspension's still settling, I'll give it a quick push here so it can kind of settle on its own. And you can see it dropped just a little bit. It's not a ton, but as soon as you start to put tongue weight on it, that's when you really notice the difference, you know, when I see the wheel well getting pretty low to the tire, it's never bottomed out or anything along those lines. But getting that little extra space is a little bit more, you know, comforting knowing as I go over things, I do have that added ground clearance. Something else that it helps with is having a little bit of sway control on the vehicle because you have those filled up, as it starts to lean, that pressure's gonna wanna keep the car nice and planted. And that was a huge transition for me. Previously, I had a pretty sporty car that was pretty flat handling, it was very quick handling. And as soon as I bought this van, unfortunately, I took a few corners and it just felt top heavy, sloppy, numb, just, well, how a minivan is kind of designed and I wasn't expecting anything different, but not having that nice comforting feeling as I go around corners and just kind of feeling it lean, it wasn't for me. So adding these on, it sure brought that back to life, it really is just like stiffening up the rear suspension. And again, when you wanna just go back to normal daily driving, if you want that normal feeling that you had from the factory, you just bleed that down to the minimum 5 PSI. So a lot of times when I try products out, I'm pretty, you know, I'm impressed by them. But this is one that I really, really recommend. If you have a Toyota Sienna, highly, highly recommend, absolutely get these. Talking with the Air Lift representative when he was here, I told him how excited I was to have them and how much I liked them. He knew immediately that I had a Sienna because he said, "This is kind of a problem child." And going on some of the forums and Facebook groups, I've noticed that people that have put 'em in also love them quite a bit. And this isn't not just for minivans or front wheel drive, it's really any light duty vehicle that you wanna get a little bit more out of when you're pulling that trailer. Whether it be, you know, you're just doing some moving around the house or doing some special projects, these are nice and easy to slip into place, have 'em ready to go whenever you need and really get that support. But really that's not just towing, those cargo carriers that are just weight right behind your vehicle or those roof racks or any of your passengers. So if you have an SUV that's smaller, definitely take a look at these, we have a lot of different install videos on these as well. So if you're struggling on how to get these installed, you can take a look at that or use our dealer locator to find someone close to you to get them installed. Either way, I'm a firm believer in the Airlift LoadLifter 1000s on my van. Hopefully, if you're on the fence, I'm telling you right now, you're really gonna enjoy it.