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MIT Team Creates Shock That Recharges Your Car
An anonymous reader writes "If you had a GenShock, you may not mind those potholes in the road any longer because this new prototype shock actually harvests energy from bumps in the road to save on fuel. A team of students at MIT have invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smooths the ride more effectively than conventional shocks. Senior Shakeel Avadhany and his teammates say they can produce up to a 10 percent improvement in overall vehicle fuel efficiency by using the regenerative shock absorbers. They also already have a lot of interest in their design, specifically the company that builds Humvees for the army are already planning to install them in its next version of the Humvee."
I take it you don't live in a cold weather climate or in a large city. Snow/ice + salt + plows = pot holes. Large cities have notoriously bad roads, it's too hard to repair them with so much traffic.
And it's not just bumpy roads that shocks help with. Every time you turn a corner the shocks are used to keep the car stable.
Personally, I think it's a brilliant idea. The easiest way to become more efficient is to turn the wasted energy into something useful.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Generally speaking you have more handling and fuel performance issues with having too *little* air in the tires. 27% of cars, according to the US DOT, have at least one underinflated tire.
http://www.dot.gov/affairs/nhtsa4601.htm
So what's the problem? Well, as you say, you get a harsher ride from an overinflated tire, but you get far many more problems with underinflation, which is probably far more common. Some of those problems include poor braking, slow steering, poor handling/road grip, and worse fuel economy... worse than can be made up by funky new regenerative shocks.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/225/could-we-conserve-gasoline-by-putting-more-air-in-our-tires
I know lots of people made fun of Barack Obama during the Presidential campaign for his plea to check the tire pressures, but the reality is that drivers the world over could save millions of gallons of oil annually by simply keeping tires inflated properly. In cold climates this also means double checking the pressures when the outside temperature drops by 10 degrees.
Better to pump up the tires than not.
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Some forms of active suspension mean your car can have suspension matched to the weight of the car and its loads, you can have suspension matched to an empty car when its empty and matched to a fully laden car when its loaded up instead of having a compromise setup thats matched to neither laden or unladen. How many times have you seen a car where the rear is low because of the load of the passengers or the trailer its towing?
Other forms of active suspension means you can have soft suspension when you're driving in a straight line and only have stiffer suspension when you are cornering, the result is that you can make your "cornering" rates higher performance without sacrificing your "straight line" comfort.
Other forms again allow the car to stiffen is anti roll bars and to corner flat.
Citroen has produced suspension systems that do all of the above on production cars, their first systems (on the DS and later cars) only self levelled, later their Hydractive system on the XM had "hard" and "soft" settings too eventually the Activa system on the Xantia added active anti roll bars too.
Formula One cars used active suspension, it could vary suspension rates, ride heights and anti-roll stiffness, it gave the cars that had it a competitive advantage over those that didn't but was eventually banned.