Not really planning on one of these (out of my "budget")... Just thinking about this the other night (after looking at their $2500 "Tgercage"!)...

Air-ride touts these as well handling systems, BUT...

When the "air spring" pressure is lowered, to lower a car, wouldn't that correlate to a "soft" spring??? Seems that wouldn't be too good for handling...

conversely, If the pressure was enough to be "stiff" at the lower ride heights, then wouldn't raising the car up provide a very harsh ride due to the increased air pressure?

Anyone run one of these systems? Hows the ride and handling?

One thing to recognize is that the fitted load is the same no matter what the spring rate. Thus ride height is a combination of spring rate and free length. A short stiff spring and a long soft spring can have the same ride height. This means that the air spring has the same pressure at ride height whether it be low or high.

With air springs another parameter comes into play because the "spring" (really pressure) characteristics of air are different than steel springs. Where springs are generally linear in their rate, an air spring tends to be progressive and the rate of increase depends on the compression ratio of the air chamber.

So it could be possible that a higher static ride height correlates to a softer ride because there is more air space available for compression. And that a lower static ride height could correlate to a stiffer ride as well.

All in theory of course ;-)

Back in the day we used to tune forks on dirt bikes both with the amount of air pressure and with the amount of dampening oil. We could change the compression ratio by adding more oil or less.