Porsche's Active Suspension
motor1.com
motor1.com
That'll put some spring in your step! Nice. I wonder what the motion range is, and whether there's other limitations that affect acceleration.
Bose (the sound people) were trying to get in on the game & had a variety of test-bed cars, for a long while. But weight was huge, the computer processing sucked, and the linear motors were expensive as heck. https://incompliancemag.com/bose-electromagnetic-car-suspens... https://www.extremetech.com/cars/259042-bose-sells-off-revol...
Now that we have 400V systems in our vehicles, and now that we make utterly kick ass electric motors, and now that computers quake, it's no shock this comes back. The main challenge seems like it'd be knowing what you want the car to do when you have active ride control.
The only demoes we've seen of Porsche Active Ride are ride stabilizing over bumps, which to be fair is probably the most useful thing for most people. But I'm very curious to see what happens when people start racing with active ride control, to see how cars can start taking performance advantage of these systems. This isn't like what Bose did, with electromagnetic control: the electric motor runs an air pump that drives an air spring. That sounds very practical, but it returns me to wondering about factors like acceleration and jerk/reaction speed (changes in acceleration).
Maybe I'm hallucinating but I have read this EXACT line somewhere else before...
The article embeds a youtube video showing a record lap at Nurburgring, and specifically calls out a moment where a conventional suspension would result in a small hop, which is entirely eliminated by the suspension.
The video is worth watching if you have any performance driving experience. The car looks spooky stable in the corners. It's very clearly more potent than active damper coil overs. In particular look at how it enters and exits the famous banked carousel corners. It's insanely crisp.
Also it's an oil pump, not air pump. The suspension is like an oleo strut as used on airplanes, but with a pump to dynamically change the oil pressure.
"Mercedes-Benz S-Class stability system" - https://phys.org/news/2013-09-mercedes-benz-s-class-stabilit...
don’t care how good the suspension is, that thing ain’t getting around corners very well