Porsche:
“With a hydraulic motor-pump unit connected to each damper, Porsche Active Ride puts force into the car’s suspension. The system can lift up or push down on each wheel independently, and it’s used to dramatically increase ride comfort while also eliminating perceptible body roll.”
Mercedes: Hold my Becks🍺
Thanks Porsche. You literally described Mercedes ABC Active Body Control suspension from over TWO decades ago. Except ours was integrated seamlessly with the steering, brakes and transmission. Since 1999 every upper Class Mercedes had ABC and a version of ABC is used today called Magic Body Control with an actually innovative curve tilting function. Weird how you make this seem like some new innovation and only put it on a single package of a single model.
Just don’t patent this lol.
Is this a good thing? Body roll is one of the ways you can use to gauge how close your car is to the limit.
For example the Miata suspension incorporates lots of body roll specifically to provide feedback to the driver.
Oh god. I’m going to have to sell my house to afford the repairs when this over engineered car.
Then maybe don’t buy a luxury car that you clearly can’t afford ?
KW Elimination Kit + a V3 solves this after it breaks.
It’s all about the 14-16 panamera. Pick one up for 30-35
Hasn’t Mercedes offered this for years?
Yep since the 221 S Class with magic body control. Very rare option though.
Mercedes uses a belt driven pump to control the height with magnetically controlled dampeners and nitrogen filled balls for suspension.
This uses (four?) electric pumps at each corner to control ride height and dampening in conjunction with a traditional air ride system. Something that can only be done with a high voltage system I would assume.
Man, that sounds rad, and I know it’s not a budget product so this is fine. But I’d hate to pay for the inevitable repair costs when any component in that system fails.
So Mercedes uses the Citroen system?
No idea why this is a headline- this system debuted over a decade ago for Porsche:
https://youtu.be/rJQ9DzFY-6Q?si=-QcoZTqNMKoFAZEV
It’s pretty wild- it completely eliminates body roll, which can feel a bit odd
There’s like no body roll or nose dive in our cayenne, it’s so weird compared to a GX460 where there’s tons. Feels odd for sure.
The suspension magic in the Cayenne is legit. Corners flat, doesn’t wallow, tons of grip, never unsettled. I’m not looking forward to an air suspension repair… but until then I’ll just enjoy the bullet train feeling.
I have driven a 2021 GX460 and man that thing scared me, you are not kidding about the body roll. It feels like it will tip over taking a turn at 20mph and even going near the brakes will make it nose dive so much so you can see it from the interior and feel it in your stomach. I am shocked Toyota/Lexus did not do anything to fix that for years.
Yea, I drive one along with a Cayenne with PDCC that has basically no body roll or dive when not going hard. It is completely different.
The funny part was at the time I was looking for an offroader/overlander vehicle that could tow and people kept telling my to look at the GX. After driving the GX I went right to a Toyota dealer in another state and got a 4Runner TRD Pro, it felt like a race car compared to the GX lol.
I also wish the Cayenne had a better interior and rode nicer on bad roads. I seriously contemplated getting a Cayenne S but with all our potholes and the Audi-esque interior, I went right to the X7. I really wish Porsche put more flair into the Cayenne’s interior and made it ride better.
I think Toyota has an active suspension system they put on the landcruiser/lx570 KDSS or something like that. Maybe they didn’t bother to put it on the gx460
this system debuted over a decade ago for Porsche:
it’s a different system.
The one you linked loads antiroll bars to avoid body roll.
The new system can independently control each shock, like a lowrider would.
So what Citroën did in the 70’s? Great.
Congratulations for Porsche on catching up with Citroen, truly what a marvel of technology
why so negative?
So, just like my 20 year old CL’s hydraulic ABC. It’s not something new but sure hope they improve it’s reliability.
What ever happened to the Viking Berserker aftermarket active management sports suspension. I don’t see it in their website anymore. Don’t this do something similar? And it would be adaptable to something besides, you know, a $150k Porsche…
To the folks on here parroting “Citroen did this 70 years ago” or “how’s this different from other adaptive suspensions,” what Porsche came up with is different and a completely active system that is able to proactively output forces toward each wheel, and fully control the pitch and roll behavior of the vehicle. This is similar in theory to the new Ferrari Purosangue, but is slightly different in execution (the specifics are mentioned in the article).
Other systems in the past are considered “semi-active” since they are only reactive to changes in the road surface or driver inputs. This includes magnetic-rheological dampers on GM cars (Corvettes, Blackwing), Porsche’s PDCC, or Mclaren/Rivian’s cross-linked hydraulic systems.
How about Bose/Lexus’s system 30 years ago?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3KPYIaks1UY
Never made it to production, but performs what you described.
I will beg to differ a bit here though. If you ask me, I think all active suspensions have a reactive element to them. As for porsches new system, it still has to know when to apply force to each corner, and that requires data from other parameters like gyroscopes, steering angle, etc. So, it’s still reactive in the sense that it acts based on data from other parts of the car. The closest we can get to true proactive suspensions is with road scanning technology. And if you think about it, its still sort of reactive. Well, All in all, this along with other types of active suspensions, is pretty impressive.
The hardware is seemingly simple.
Bold words
This thread somehow managed to bring a particularly large amount of weirdos out of the woodwork. I’m curious what the specific trigger was for that.
That’s just the majority of this sub tbh
“New” + “Eliminate” + “Porsche”
That’s a winning combo for a pedantic paradise!
That’s kinda sick but at the same time holy motions sickness Batman
Insert snarky thoughtless comment from someone who didn’t read the article here
The Lexus LX -08-Current has this.
It can help with nose dive and body roll, in addition to stiffening of softening suspension
Yep, it’s called the AHC (active height control) since it’s also meant to help when off road. I love it. It’s the reason I got an LX instead of the Land Cruiser.
Yup, I love it and use it. Very reliable on and offroad