There have been numerous attempts to make car suspensions active, generally resulting in failure. While a fancy newfangled dynamic electronic spring system can in practice make bumping a tire result in a single motion back and forth rather than a dampened sine wave, in practice this is solving a non-problem. You could get a similar effect just by making the suspension looser.



What you really want is a suspension which dynamically changes tightness on wheels based on current maneuvering. Specifically, when turning left you want to tighten the right wheels, right tighten the left wheels, when braking tighten the front wheels, and when accelerating tighten the back. Really the important one is turns - braking and accelerating are more comfortable when the suspension is tight, but getting at an angle when going around a turn can cause you to fly off the road.



My idea for dynamic tightness is the following: instead of the springs pushing directly against the axle, have them be at an angle, and make the angle get closer to right when the driver turns in the opposite direction. That way the tire will have more leverage against the spring normally, and less when turning. If the wheel is in normal position, this won't require any force at all, but if it's slightly up then more force will be required, since the spring works harder against the wheel being in an off-normal position when it's configured to be tighter. This is actually useful force feedback to the driver, and should be regarded as a good thing.



Making this work of course would require some kind of fancy multi-link suspension, a fascinating problem to work on, but one requiring a lot of time and CAD skills.





Unrelated to the content of this post, I'd like to note that livejournal is making my text input area considerably wider than my screen, and that the autosave feature is causing the text area to dynamically rejustify in the middle of typing, and that it's REALLY PISSING ME OFF.

