Thats a solid thing to ask. Many people just want a nicely made, yet affordable car, yet car makers are trying to make a small hadron collider as standard equipment. This, in turn, jacks up the base price and aint no one want this shiz. Its cool, but man we dont need it!
Unfortunately most people do actually want this. Same thing with touchscreens everywhere. You’re just out of touch with the average consumer. As are most of us here
Yup!
It wasn't me, but if we can just get an objective way to test steering feel, that'd be cool too. Like actually quantify how much road and cornering forces make it up the column to the wheel.
Steering feel is about the tires loading up. All steering wheels will vibrate by virtue of being connected to the road.
When stationary, the steering wheel is heavy because the car's wheels aren't moving. As they turn, gyroscopic forces cause the wheels to try and lift themselves off the ground which translates to lighter steering feel.
As you brake, more weight goes into the front tires and the steering gets heavier. As you turn and the steering loads up, it gets heavier. If you lose traction, the steering becomes very lose until you gain traction again.
Steering weight is affected by steering shaft geometry. If it's a straight line from the steering output shaft to the steering rack, that will provide optimal steering feel and weight. If the intermediate steering shaft(s) has to bend around stuff, like on a short-nosed MR car, the steering will be heavier. Think about using a socket wrench with two angle adapters and two extensions trying to tighten a bolt. You get less torque transmittal than if those two extensions tightening a bolt straight ahead.
EPAS systems hide this by overboosting at all times. Manufacturers program in resistance to try and simulate steering weight but that's not the same thing. What they should do is to reduce torque output to like 20% and let the weight transmit through the wheel. That would be infinitely better and much, much easier.
There’s no measurement for steering feel because it’s actually not a thing in and of itself. The road forces making it up to the wheel aren’t necessarily the end-all-be-all, because the steering wheel isn’t where you get most of the feedback from the car.
When you apply a steering input the front tires turn, build Ay (lateral acceleration), the car starts to yaw (turn) which causes the rear tires to start to build Ay to *stop the car from yawing too much.* The intertia of the sprung mass causes the body to roll, which happens at a different rate and magnitude at each of the 4 corners.
While the steering torque and vibration can tell you what the front tires are doing at the road interface, your inner ear tells you what the *car* is doing in terms of roll, yaw, and lateral acceleration.
Good steering feel is when the car’s roll, yaw, lateral acceleration, and steering torque all build and drop in harmony as you steer into and out of a corner.
For example, if the rear shocks have too little roll damping, then the rear will continue to build roll even after you’ve started to unwind the steering. So while your steering input tells you that the car should be returning to straight ahead, the delayed body roll is telling your inner ear that the car is still progressing *into* the turn. Those conflicting signals are what you perceive as poor steering feel, because you literally can’t get an accurate sense of what the car is actually doing.
Getting all those behaviors to be perfectly in sync across all driving and road conditions is *extremely* difficult, for many reasons. No car does it perfectly. No car has ever done it perfectly. Not Porsche, not Ferrari, and not Lotus.
No, that’s good chassis feel. Modern cars often have good chassis feel but terrible steering feel.
Good steering feel is everywhere at all times. Steady-state straight-line, loaded mid-corner, unloaded corner exit on throttle with a tire in the air, should all feel natural without bump steer and the texture of the road should be apparent in all.
Yup, those are also aspects. But I do this stuff for a living, and people’s perception of steering feel inherently includes chassis behavior. If it was only the thing you said it would be much easier to achieve good steering feel.
Part of the reason I said what I said is because Gordon Murray never mentions anything other than front suspension when discussing steering feel and its development. That may partially be because he wouldn’t consider a car completed in terms of dynamics if the rear suspension wasn’t up to par.
I’ve set cars up from scratch, and even while dialing in rear spring and damping rates, the steering feedback, the way the car talks through the wheel itself, was relatively constant.
If you define steering feel as literally just what you feel through the steering wheel, then sure, I’ll agree with that. But I think most people think of steering feel as the ability to accurately perceive the car’s response to a steering input. I’ve been developing suspensions for 2 decades and you can’t separate steering feel from chassis behavior any more than you can from the tire performance.
If you have a link to where Gordon Murray discusses that, I’d be interested to see it . . . Always good to hear other perspectives. (He undoubtably knows and agrees with what I’m saying but was likely discussing it in a more narrow scope. Nobody who does this work professionally would say that the rear suspension doesn’t matter for steering feel). Over-damping the rear suspension in rebound is one of the most common ways to screw up steering feel, and most people would perceive this as a too-compliant front tire or steering system.
I didn’t look closely at the y axis for the interior sound graph and was extremely confused for a moment. Strange choice to me to set it up that way.
It’s interesting to see the raptor and the spectre charted like this. It does make sense. Things like head toss are gonna be hard to avoid when your head is that far above the surface.
It's absolutely incredible just how quiet that rolls is on smooth tarmac though. 50dBa is basically standard urban/office noise, it practically just killed all road noise.
> It’s interesting to see the raptor
But its also why I don't judge folks who buy bronco raptors and ZR2s for daily driving, what makes them so good off-road is what makes them so comfortable on road.
lol are we really going to like someone bought a Bronco R because it would be more senible as a daily driver?
They bought it because they like the attention
There are significantly better cars to buy if you just want attention, most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a standard bronco and a raptor lol, they’d just think you out a set of douche tires on it and some edgy drls
Yeah I gotta admit too that I can see the appeal of a truck/SUV for on-road comfort due to them being able to absorb bumps and potholes better. Tire sidewall is definitely a big chunk of that equation. Like Tyga famously said, "Too much rim make the ride too hard." Also less chance of getting curb rash on your wheels if the tires can just roll over the curb.
Exactly, I don't understand why car enthusiasts out of all people can't understand this concept. It even applies to sports cars - a properly set up car with compliant suspension, less unsprung mass, thick sidewall is perfectly comfortable to daily.
A modern F150 is no s-class but it's damn luxurious for what it is
Yeah the modern luxo-barges of yesteryear have been succeeded by modern trucks/SUVs: huge, comfortable, with big engines, fat tires, soft/plowing suspension, and luxurious trims with luxurious prices. It sucks too that the trend of bigger = better for wheel diameters has led to the demise of proper sidewall sizes to absorb bumps and vibrations. It gets worse when you shop higher end trims or models since you usually can't find anything less than 20". But yeah, people need to think of tires as part of the suspension, like, it's basically a big rubber cushion that dampens the road from you, and the less you have of it, the more you feel bumps and vibrations.
That’s what I mean though. The lifted truck bros don’t do it for functionality. They want everyone to be forced to see the monstrosity as the roll coal down the highway
yeah and my point is if you wanted attention you’d modify a base bronco instead of buying a raptor lol why spend 90k and get an ecoboost
10k less and you could get a f250 with the turbodiesel and properly coal roal, few grand for the worst lift kit of all time and emissions delete
that makes absolutely no sense, what are you going to do shout at the top of your lungs I have a raptor at every stoplight? Then give them a lecture on raptor and SVT? While revving your ecoboost V6 with a soft limiter?
there are significantly better cars if you want attention. nobody is paying $90k on a bronco with an ecoboost for attention lol. those folks all get f250s and go straight to the shop with the 10k they saved
> 50dBa is basically standard urban/office noise
50 dBA at 50 mph no less. The inside of my living room on a quiet morning is 39 dBA. It spikes well above 50 if I even type on my laptop. To think that driving at (minimum) legal motorway speeds is quieter than typing in my living room is staggering.
Throttle House had that great [demonstration](https://youtu.be/aWSCm3YN_sQ?t=600) of the rock band playing right beside the Spectre and how much it muffled the sound.
They won't even know you're there. Jay Leno said he was at a red light in his Spectre and saw ambulance lights in the rear view mirror and wondered why they didn't turn the siren on...but they did. He didn't hear it until it was passing him.
Would be great to see my super duty up there - four corners of leaf springs, 5,000 lb front and 7,000 lb rear axle, and almost nothing to weigh it down (5500lbs). It's not quite an M715 but if you take a bump wrong at speed it'll give you a good kick.
While they are significantly more comfortable than they used to be, an F250 is a lottttt stiffer than a Raptor or even base F150. You'll feel the pothole if you aren't loaded down.
It's still crazy to me how much engineering car companies do to work around the issues of big wheels with run-flat tires. Pretty much every car rides better if you downsize the wheels from 20" to 18" with nice non-run-flat tires (throw a spare in the trunk which is what every car should come with anyways).
Yeah, if you have a performance car the brakes are often massive, but in a lot of cars you can get away with bumping down an inch or two without running into clearance issues. It makes a decent difference.
There are some really good-riding older cars with passive springs and dampers as well.
They typically have low curb weight, narrow and small-diameter wheels, low-ply-count tires with an aspect ratio of 60 or higher, and rubber bushings.
Oh, and they typically are already loud, so the sound aspect of ride quality doesn’t have the same effect.
this is like what Dolby noise reduction did for music - create a purer sound.
in the same way this is a form of road noise reduction to get a purer driving experience.
I think people reacted negatively to the notion of isolation as a purer driving experience. I agree with your sentiment, although I'd probably call it a purer "transportation" experience in the sense that driving a Spectre is being transported to your destination with minimal interruption from the outside world such that the cabin remains pure from disruption.
Thats a cool analogy! I agree. It really is impressive how these cars pull this off...
IDK why your comment is at the negative dislike counts. Its, in a way, purer, but not in the traditionally "pure driving experience" we thing of when we hear that term. When I hear that term, I think of a sports car with hard suspension and no driver aids. Unlike with music, the top quality and pure music is highly mixed! With racing cars, its the other way around, how raw can you get... So maybe, a raw car is like PLAYING guitar, and a car (lets say Taycan) is like LISTENING to a well mixed guitar! :D
This is one of the most informative pieces of car journalism I've read in a long time.
* Rolls Royce really back up what they say. The results would've been even better if their test car had the 22 inch rims. But all the press cars come with the 23" and that's what nearly all buyers get. It's a perfect example of form over function because not only do the 22" have better ride quality, but they also have more range. Oh well, when you have half a million to spend and it's already the quietest car, I guess the difference is negligible.
* Porsche Active Ride. There's been a lot of press about it, but almost no credit to ZF who created the system. It's called [sMOTION](https://www.zf.com/products/en/cars/products_64239.html) and was developed in 2018. The Yangwang U9 (BYD brand) uses a similar system. They had a similar demonstration to Porsche: Porsche made the Panamera e-hybrid dance and Yangwang made the U9 jump.
* Magneride. That graph showing the difference between track and other modes was telling. I've always heard how well the Corvette rides, but seeing the breadth of suspension stiffness is convincing.
I really want to drive a Spectre now, I just can't imagine what it would be like to zip down the highway and hear... nothing. Might be a bit hard to get a test drive I imagine.
Although I hate my Ford for its horrendous reliability, I gotta say I love the way they tuned the suspension on the Ford Escape PHEV. Its super cushy over undulations in the road, but when you corner it tightens up and feels closer to a Mazda.
This was a pretty cool look at different suspension set ups, obviously wildly different vehicles too. Its interesting looking over all the data, including the Corvette mode comparison.
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