After watching loads of videos of the new Ariel Nomad, as well as factoring in my own slowly cemented preconceptions about what makes a driver’s car worthy, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that modern cars are just too stiff. Especially the sporty ones, and it ruins part of the fun.
Rock hard suspension setups in road cars is a relatively recent fad, most likely originating in Germany. It’s a disease that has poisoned the industry and it has made most manufacturers think it’s worth it to have slightly better cornering at the expense of comfort. No matter how well damped a car is, if its springs are too firm you will notice it.
The Germans were among the first in the world to have proper highways, so that’s why they decided to sacrifice comfort. However, their cars and the ones they inspired afterward don’t really work in places where potholes are common, or they do, but your back won’t like it.
French manufacturers, for instance, had nothing of the kind, and they concentrated their efforts on making cars as squishy as possible. This approach has died out, to the point where not even Citroen makes “traditional French cars” any more.
People nowadays, even the ones who know cars, have grown accustomed to this new-found rigidity they see in all new vehicles, but they just feel like it’s the mark of progress. Just because a car has better cornering capabilities and less visible weight transfer doesn’t mean it’s better.
Sadly, automakers these days, well, most of them anyway, are not only making suspensions firm, but they’re also changing the seats too. Few modern cars have properly comfortable seats, and out of all those, even fewer have comfortable ones that also happen to be hard. There are exceptions, but generally speaking, your back would much rather travel in an older car, you know the ones that used springs not only to suspend the car but also in the seats themselves.
These are things we now see as outdated, and we only expect comfort from certain models or marques, but really it should be something you get with every new car… Perhaps the auto industry has evolved all wrong, based on wide-reaching marketing research which gave manufacturers an average of what all people wanted. The only problem is not that many people actually knew what they wanted, but their opinion was factored in anyway.
Perhaps hydraulic systems should have been made more prolific. Sure, it’s expensive to fit a car with one now, but had it been made the norm decades ago, by now, the price would have definitely dropped to bearable levels, just like any new tech that gets old.
Modern cars are too stiff and people just seem to want more and more of it; if you’ve ever sat in a Mercedes SL Black Series, you’ll know the ridiculous and almost masochistic heights this has reached.
Returning to the Ariel Nomad, the fact that its suspension has far more give than, say, its stiffer brother the Atom, doesn’t make it worse; it may not be as fast around a corner as the Atom, because flat cornering certainly has its advantages (in having to shave less speed), but it’s fast enough and the body roll will be there for you to gauge where the grip is and how much of it you still have left.
There would be more to talk about on this matter, but how do you feel about it? Are cars (and especially sporty ones) too stiff or should I buy a back brace and deal with it because it really is progress?