Head to head

The nearest neighbour we have, and a different room in the yard.

TruckScience is the best known name in axle weight calculation and it earned that. It answers the question at the moment a vehicle is being specified. We answer it on the load going on that vehicle today.

TruckScience
15 capabilities
Public documentation, August 2026

Who it is for

Truck dealers, bodybuilders and specification engineers.

Deciding how a vehicle should be built is a real trade with real consequences, and this is the software for it.

Start with a chassis. Add a body, a crane, a tail lift, a tank, a fridge unit. Every one of those has a weight and a position, and every one of them changes what the front axle and the rear group carry before a single pallet goes on. Getting that wrong produces a vehicle that is uneconomic or illegal from the day it is delivered, and it is very expensive to discover afterwards.

TruckScience works from vehicle and body data to show exactly that, and produces the drawings and reports a dealer needs to prove the specification to a customer before anything is built. It publishes legal limit checking for the regions it covers, so a specification can be sanity-checked as well as calculated.

If you are speccing vehicles before they are built, buy it. AxleGuard can retain the accepted final-stage/bodybuilder record and the geometry its load model uses; it holds no chassis reference library and produces no dealer build drawings. Those pre-build rows are a plain no in our column below.

The arithmetic is the same in both rooms. Who is asking, how often, and what happens next are not.

Two moments, one arithmetic

The moment a vehicle is configured, and the morning a particular load goes on it. The physics is the same. Almost everything else about the two situations is different — who is asking, how often, how fast the answer is needed, and what happens next.

The equipment record the physics runs on: axle positions in millimetres, tire specification and rating, slider hole spacing and travel limits.

The job it was not built for

Three differences, and none of them is about the arithmetic.

The calculation in a good axle weight calculator is sound. What differs is when it runs, what it runs against, and what happens with the answer.

It runs when somebody opens it

A desk tool checks the loads a person chose to check. Almost nobody opens a calculator for a routine load on a familiar lane, and that is precisely the load that quietly goes over.

The answer stops at the numbers

Knowing the drive tandem is over by 1,140 lb is halfway. The yard needs the move in holes and inches, and the planner needs to know which rule bound it and in which state, because the fix differs.

It has no view of the rest of the day

The route, the drop at stop two, the fuel burned by the afternoon and the jurisdiction crossed at lunchtime. AxleGuard also keeps a named derived journey replay, with physical signals accepted only after gateway commissioning.

Fifteen rows, two different trades

One row is a yes on both sides, and it is the row that matters most: axle weights calculated from where the payload sits. Three rows are pre-build specification work we do not do, and stability is a planning-grade partial rather than an engineering output. The remaining ten are the enforcement arithmetic and what happens to it during a working day.

The 15 rows above, by whose trade they belong to

rows

27%

67%

Specification work, where we are a no or a part4 rows
Axle weights from payload position, where both say yes1 rows
Enforcement arithmetic and the running day10 rows

Counted from the table above. A dealer speccing a tanker body should buy the tool built for that, and this page has never argued otherwise.

Side by side

Fifteen capabilities, with three plain no and one partial.

Pre-build specification, reference data and customer drawings belong to the other column. AxleGuard's CG/stability output is planning advice, not an engineering certification, so it stays partial.

The whole axle and load tools category

AxleGuard compared with the TruckScience Axle Weight Calculator across fifteen capabilities
Capability	AxleGuard	TruckScience
Axle weights calculated from payload position	Yes	Yes
Vehicle and body specification for dealers	No	Yes
Chassis and equipment reference data	No	Yes
Customer-facing specification drawings and reports	No	Yes
Centre of gravity and stability output	part	Yes
Legal limit checking by region	Yes	part
Bridge formula on every consecutive axle group	Yes	n/p
Tire and axle-rating limits layered on statute	Yes	n/p
Binding rule named on the verdict	Yes	n/p
Corrective move in slider holes and inches	Yes	n/p
Re-solved per leg as freight comes off	Yes	n/p
Permit pathway when no legal position exists	Yes	n/p
Truck-legal road planned for the same load	Yes	No
Derived replay now; physical axle signal after commissioning	part	No
Runs on every load inside dispatch	Yes	No

supportedpart partly, or with limits not supportedn/p not published by the vendor

Methodology

Drawn from publicly published product documentation as of August 2026. Not published means we could not confirm the capability in the vendor's own material, not that the product lacks it. This is the comparison we are most likely to have got wrong, and we would rather correct it than defend it.

When to pick them instead

Four situations where TruckScience is the answer.

You are a dealer, a bodybuilder or a specification engineer. AxleGuard records the accepted finished build; it does not decide where equipment should sit on an unbuilt chassis.
You need customer-facing specification drawings and reports to prove a build before it is made.
You need centre of gravity and stability analysis as an engineering output rather than as a compliance check.
You need reference data for chassis and bodies you do not own yet. Our model starts from equipment you actually run.

Working together

Specify the vehicle once. Check the load every day.

01
The vehicle is specified once, properly
A dealer or a bodybuilder works out where the tank, the crane or the tail lift goes, and what that does to the axle loads of the finished vehicle. That is specification work and it is a different trade.
02
The finished equipment becomes a record
Axle positions in millimetres from the front, tire specifications and ratings, tare weight, kingpin offset, slider hole spacing and travel. Once, per combination.
03
Every load is then solved against it
Not the loads somebody decided to check. Every load, including the routine one on the familiar lane where the pallets happened to be stacked differently this morning.
04
The answer follows the load all day
Through the route, the drops, the fuel burn and the state line at lunchtime. The current journey view uses derived replay; a physical reading joins it only after gateway commissioning.

The category, the matrix and the neighbours.

Run the same load through both.

Take a load your calculator has already cleared and put it through ours. If the two answers differ, one of us is wrong about your trailer, and that is worth knowing.

Bring one lane Open AxleGuard