RE: PH Origins: Road-scanning suspension

[Orange Rocket]

VW tried to claim the worlds first engine with a supercharger and a turbocharger a few years ago but conveniently forgot about the Nissan Micra SuperTurbo built for homologation purposes previously.

This Porsche also tried to claim four wheel steering recently too? Pretty sure my '95 Honda Prelude had electronic four wheel steering (most of the time anyway, otherwise a lot of pretty lights on the dash board!). The gen3 Prelude had a mechanical four wheel steering system if my memory serves me correct.

[TooMany2cvs]

Orange Rocket said:

VW tried to claim the worlds first engine with a supercharger and a turbocharger a few years ago but conveniently forgot about the Nissan Micra SuperTurbo built for homologation purposes previously.

And that was only three years after the Lancia S4.

Orange Rocket said:

This Porsche also tried to claim four wheel steering recently too? Pretty sure my '95 Honda Prelude had electronic four wheel steering (most of the time anyway, otherwise a lot of pretty lights on the dash board!). The gen3 Prelude had a mechanical four wheel steering system if my memory serves me correct.

1910:


1935:


Ain't nothin' as new as the marketing people claim...

Remember back in the mid-00s when steerable headlights were new made a brief come-back, 40 years after the DS did it properly, before disappearing again when the sheer laziness of just turning on one fog light became perfectly acceptable?

[dandare]

Bose went a few steps further. Sadly it never made production:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY

I'll give PHer Kitchski the credit for putting me onto this.

Edited by dandare on Tuesday 19th December 10:05

[anonymous-user]

csd19 said:

AER said:

csd19 said:

Max_Torque said:

The old Nissan system could just basically say "this road is bumpy" (on average) and put change the damping to suit. That is really not very useful as it's reacting to what has gone and not to what is coming!

No, the Nissan system read the road and changed the damping BEFORE the bump had been encountered. Just in the way the Merc system does. It might not have the fancy damping profiles to adjust eleventy-billion times per second, however it did behave in the same manner.

I think with only one sensor placed where the wheels never go, Max's description is pretty accurate...

It does still adjust the damping pre-bump though, and not "reacting to what has gone" - that would be more akin to Citroen's hydropneumatics (as mentioned by a previous poster) or even Koni's FSD dampers.

unlikely to be able to actively compensate for up coming road profile at any significant speed.

ie, 30mph is 13.4m/s. That sensor is at max 1m in front of the front wheels (suspect it actually more like 50cm in front) so that's a max latency of control, at just 30mph, of 74ms, including doing what ever actuation is required to change the damper rate. Back then, damping rate was mechanically modified with an electromechanical actuator that actually modified the shim stack preload or valve area, that itself would have taken something like 200ms to do!

The modern Merc system scans well ahead of the car to give itself time to calculate the necessary change and to implement that change, which on modern magnetorheological dampers is much faster (still in the 50m/s approx time frame).

[Lewis Kingston]

Max_Torque said:

unlikely to be able to actively compensate for up coming road profile at any significant speed.

Back then, damping rate was mechanically modified with an electromechanical actuator that actually modified the shim stack preload or valve area, that itself would have taken something like 200ms to do!

The modern Merc system scans well ahead of the car to give itself time to calculate the necessary change and to implement that change, which on modern magnetorheological dampers is much faster (still in the 50m/s approx time frame).

No, agreed - even the Mercedes system gives up at 80mph - but Nissan did claim that its dampers could switch from soft (or medium) modes to firm in 50ms, though. Going the other way was admittedly much slower, though, with a quoted time of 400ms to go from medium to soft due to the valving system.

The breadth of what it can perceive will be low, of course (as indicated and suggested), and it will only be assessing an average of what's ahead, so - of course - the Mercedes systems is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of its capabilites.

There does appear to have been a more advanced interation down the line but I've yet to really find anything meaningful on it.

[Lewis Kingston]

dandare said:

Bose went a few steps further. Sadly it never made production:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY

I'll give PHer Kitchski the credit for putting me onto this.

Edited by dandare on Tuesday 19th December 10:05

Still amazing to watch, that.

[Ursicles]

Never seen that before... def a few WOW moments there!

[J4CKO]

I have always been fascinated by this, Bose suspension.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY

Does this scan the road ?

[Munich]

In a similar sentiment to this, Mercedes also claim to be the first manufacturer to introduce ABS on a production car, completely forgetting Jensen introduced ABS brakes with the FF in 1966. The full detail of the claim should be, "electronic four-wheel multi-channel ABS" (while the Jensen was a mechanical system) but that doesn't sound so good on the marketing slogans.

[Super Slo Mo]

I remember reading a magazine article, circa 1990 about active suspension. The demo car was, I think, a volvo 740, but it was Lotus who were working on the project (I think, it was a long time ago).

The car was doing similar things to the Bose suspension, in that it could apparently completely smooth out the road.

Don’t think it ever made it past the prototype stage.

[cptsideways]

The Toyota Lexus Soarer UZZ32 had a pretty mega fully active system

[adingley84]

csd19 said:

Max_Torque said:

The old Nissan system could just basically say "this road is bumpy" (on average) and put change the damping to suit. That is really not very useful as it's reacting to what has gone and not to what is coming!

No, the Nissan system read the road and changed the damping BEFORE the bump had been encountered. Just in the way the Merc system does. It might not have the fancy damping profiles to adjust eleventy-billion times per second, however it did behave in the same manner.

THANK YOU. I was well on my way to pointing this out but you were one step ahead of me...much like the sonar system scanning the road ahead in fact! 😀

[8V085]

Lewis Kingston said:

donkmeister said:

After Nissan, but before Mercedes, I'm certain Citroen released a system on tbe C5 that scanned the road ahead for bumps and holes, adjusting the suspension on each wheel to cope.
I can't seem to find anything about it though.

Do shout if you come across something concrete – I'll have a further look around for more details later, too. Always looking to add more to the mental archives!

C6 introduced a system which used input from front wheels to prepare rear wheels which would have been tested on a C5 mule. Perhaps he mixed it up with Citroen XM ALTO prototype which used road scanning cameras for autonomous driving (or at least some functionalities of it).

[AER]

adingley84 said:

csd19 said:

Max_Torque said:

The old Nissan system could just basically say "this road is bumpy" (on average) and put change the damping to suit. That is really not very useful as it's reacting to what has gone and not to what is coming!

No, the Nissan system read the road and changed the damping BEFORE the bump had been encountered. Just in the way the Merc system does. It might not have the fancy damping profiles to adjust eleventy-billion times per second, however it did behave in the same manner.

THANK YOU. I was well on my way to pointing this out but you were one step ahead of me...much like the sonar system scanning the road ahead in fact! ??

Check Lewis Kingston's quotes above. If it takes 400ms to go from medium to soft and it only has ~100ms to react, how do you expect it to do anything meaningful about the pothole it detects, aside from the fact that it would miss a pothole that the wheels would actually collect...?

[anonymous-user]

Munich said:

In a similar sentiment to this, Mercedes also claim to be the first manufacturer to introduce ABS on a production car, completely forgetting Jensen introduced ABS brakes with the FF in 1966. The full detail of the claim should be, "electronic four-wheel multi-channel ABS" (while the Jensen was a mechanical system) but that doesn't sound so good on the marketing slogans.

Really the details could just be "ABS that does more than stopping the wheels competely locking"!

The mech ABS was pointless. it couldn't cycle fast enough to optimise traction, and it couldn't "Pick lowest" for stability, all it did was keep the wheels turning. Unfortunately, what that mean't is you couldn't actually stop on anything slightly slippy. Back in the early 1990's a friend of mine came round in his Ford Scorpio, which had mech ABS, came into the car park out side my work, at about 12mph, and then proceeded to drive straight across that car park at the same 12mph and crash into the wall of the industrial unit where i worked! Turns out the car park was a bit icey and the system basically just turned off the brakes completely.......

Now, early Electrical ABS wasn't brilliant either, but it was at least fit for purpose imo!