Any car enthusiasts here?

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i am not an engineer so will you tell me another name for "unsprung weight"? i know their [buick's] suspension engineering was amateurish with this auto. a mercedes 190 of equivalent weight and size floated over the bumps but still handled decently. then again, the suspension of the mercedes prolly cost more than the entire buick century car did.

Unsprung weight is the weight that is on the road side of the springs. The wheels and tires, usually the brakes, and portions of the weight of the other moving things. Light, custom wheels are an excellent upgrade on a car technically - that's why they are also considered attractive, which is sometimes imitated even if they are utilitarian looking.

i'm wondering why more cars besides the aforementioned '00 ford focus can't ride as well? at the time, i thought that was the best riding [overall, with handling factored in] automobile that ford ever made.

An excellent book on ride and handling, all in layman's terms, is "How to make your car handle" by Fred Puhn. I don't know why factories don't always bother, but it probably has a lot to do with bosses who think they know more than they do.

i suppose the reason more attention isn't paid to NVH/ride smoothness, is that the majority of cars are bought by young people in good physical shape with all their internal shock absorption in prime condition, IOW these blessed youths literally cannot feel the bumps in the road in the first place.

i can feel the bumps.


i don't think young people are buying a lot of new cars...they're way too expensive - most everyone i know drives something from like 2004.

in shelton, WA [the county seat of my county] the roads downtown are like a moonscape with brutally pockmarked, potholed, segmented, frostheaved pavement, a '93 cadillac sedan de ville floated over them quietly and serenely [albeit a bit boat-like, sorta like being in a yacht on a wavy bit of ocean], but a 2017 chevy impala LT1 felt like a paint shaker over the same pavements. i place the blame squarely on those STOOOOOPID big@$$ed wagon wheels with rubber band tires [45mm sidewall which isn't enough rubber to soak up a pebble much less segmented pavement]. if only it had 16" rims [what the last model had] and 70 series rubber, it woulda rode like something closer to that old cadillac.

and being that spring rates are selected for a given sized wheel/tire combo, it would do no good to just swap out those stooooopid big@$$ed wagon wheels and silly slim rubber for 16" rims and 70 series rubber, the result of that would be a very rubbery ride, very jiggly as the spring/wheel combo would lack sufficient mass damping of wheel motion over bumps and sharp road undulations. so the springs would have to be swapped out also for lower-rate ones.

Please, read the book.

when i asked a suspension guy about this, that is what HE told me.

So, loan him the book when you are done. This topic requires a lot of background and math, but it is swamped with half-baked generalizations. Ask that guy to describe the difference that rising-rate springs make to shock absorber requirements to see if he knows a bit more than most.
Car design is a huge series of conflicts and trade-offs, and you give a smooth ride an extremely high priority. Others prefer what they have, or at least what the builder had in mind. Again - if you don't like the ride, check the "shocks" first - push down hard on each corner of the car, and see if it bounces more than once. The recommended tire pressure is usually best, too.

being a back patient with arthritic joints that get sore when jarred [IOW my body's own internal shock absorption is kaput], i need a smooth ride. soft shocks did not help my honda CRV AWD [rides hard and wobbly like a jeep], they made it ride more harshly. took it to a suspension person who told me about the compromises between mass, spring rate, suspension travel, damping and a few other things and said the honda was not improvable other than keeping the tire pressure no higher than 30 psi and a special truck driver's cushion for the driver's seat which makes it tolerable. i do wish i coulda gotten that cadillac.

What he meant was that it would be easier to trade than to modify. It is easy to find someone to improve traction for racing, but I've never heard of a ride enthusiast or non-industry expert doing mods, so you'd be paying for someone's education, and buying all custom parts. "Shocks" do make the ride firmer, but they stop the wallowing that makes you seasick.

the cadillac was almost perfect except that they are money pits. always somethin' ain't it? the 2014-2109 chevy impala base models would ride so much gentler if they stuck with 16" rims and 205/65R tires [what the 2013 models had] instead of the 18"/225/45R they put on 'em now. that applies to 2014-2019 cadillacs as well. if they did that, it would ride sorta like the cadillac but handle a lot better still. 45mm sidewall height is just insufficient rubber to absorb any impact at all, plus the wet-weather traction sucks. if only all cars rode like citroens.

Until your tire sidewalls are completely crushed and the rims pinch the rubber, the air in them has no idea if it is in a high aspect tire or a low one. It responds according to the pressure. A wider tire, however, gets more area onto the road with less axle drop. We are using lower sidewalls now because we can design compliance into the suspension with better control over it, and want more room for the brakes.

Here's a brain teaser if you think you understand cars: How does the air hold the rim up? The pressure is constant in all directions.

then why do all the cars i've ridden in with rubberband tires ride so harshly? i'm not the only one saying this, test drivers say this as well in comparing different trim levels of the same car. it is not my imagination. rubberband tires don't have as much cushioning as tall aspect ratio tires. they are also NOISIER as well. plus they are FUGLY. IMHO nothing on a car is tackier-looking to me than those big wagon wheels that so many find so fashionable. AFAIC they are the automobile style equivalent of a piercing through the nose or those earlobe-expanding things that some people wear nowadays. we will agree to disagree, end of discussion.