WASHINGTON — Drivers sick of having to be vigilant for bone-jarring potholes could get some relief from high-tech car suspensions.
Ford is touting its latest vehicle equipped with “pothole mitigation technology.” The automaker said its 2017 Ford Fusion, when bought in the higher-end Sport trim, will be the first midsize sedan in its class to feature a suspension system this advanced.
The system is already available on Lincoln vehicles. An even more advanced system from Mercedes-Benz uses a stereo camera to scan the road ahead and adjust the suspension accordingly.
In the Ford system, the vehicle uses its normal array of sensors in a novel way to detect when a tire is going over the edge of a pothole.
“Within milliseconds,” the suspension is then stiffened up so the wheel doesn’t fall as far into the pothole, says Jason Michener, a chassis engineer with Ford. He says as a result the tire “doesn’t strike the edge (of the pothole) as hard, so you don’t get that harshness and jarring feeling.”
He likens the system to the human body preventing a fall after tripping on a stair.
“It’s kind of like the car’s reflexes,” he says. This system “reacts to try and ‘catch’ the wheel, so that it doesn’t go into the pothole and essentially trip up the car.”
The adaptive suspension systems are especially useful on modern cars which use large-diameter wheels and low profile tires, which are less able to cushion against the shock of a pothole.
Michener says in the case of the higher-performance Fusion Sport, “the wheels and tires just weren’t surviving” Ford’s durability testing, until the pothole system was added.
In all cars, a pothole sends forces that push the wheel backwards in relation to the direction of the vehicle.
If a tire has been so deformed by the impact that the metal wheel comes into direct contact with the pavement, “all of a sudden those forces spike exponentially,” Michener says.
“Instead of having something that’s squishy, you now have a hard wheel meeting a hard road surface,” which can lead to bent wheels and suspension components.
