Awesome Suspension

Getting all the snow off your car when you park it outside can be a pain. Chinese automotive company NIO shows off an unconventional use for its SkyRide active suspension system: making its flagship ET9 sedan shake off a thick blanket of snow like a cold puppy dog. Just don’t do it inside the garage, ET9. Good boy.

We’ve seen a machine designed to test the suspension on LEGO cars. Here’s a series of nine LEGO Technic vehicles, each rolling on a unique suspension setup. Dr. Engine built and tested each of the rides to see which design had the best shock absorption, load handling, and rock crawling abilities.

We’ve witnessed first-hand how car companies test the suspension setups on new vehicles. They also use computer simulations with realistic physics models. This video from ExtenPro shows how various vehicle suspensions might handle on a punishing course they set up in the vehicle simulation game BeamNG drive.

If you’ve ever been on a boat in choppy seas, you know how stomach-churning it can be. Nauti-Craft has developed an active suspension system similar to the one used to smooth out cars and trucks on bumpy rides. While it can’t totally cancel out waves, it does dramatically mitigate them.