Sprung cart
horse-drawn cart
Sprung cart and unsprung cart are terms used mainly in Britain and Australia to denote a utilitarian type of two-wheeled horse-drawn cart, and indicating whether or not springs were used to support the body of the cart.
Overview
Unsprung vehicles, meaning without any springs, were simple sturdy two-wheeled vehicle used by roadmen, farmers and tradesmen. They would be used at slower speeds or carrying heavier loads, such as farm carts, those carrying coal or peat, and some heavy delivery vehicles. Farm wagons were usually unsprung, as were most of the freight and dray vehicles such as lorries and trollies. A vehicle without springs was also called a dead axle. The bandy of India is an unsprung cart.
Constructing with springs adds to the cost of the vehicle. A vehicle would be sprung if it was to be used at faster speeds, carrying certain loads, or carrying passengers. Milk floats were usually sprung. The Australian spring cart was a simple cart designed for carrying goods and did not have seating for driver or passengers.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Sprung cart” as horse-drawn cart. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25039821. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sprung cart” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.