Skip to main content

How Bentley Dynamic Ride Cushions On-Road and Conquers Off-Road

We might be a long way from the Blower Bentleys of old, but the company has made a return to its sporting car roots in recent years. That means that they need to mix extreme ultra-luxury comfort with premium handling. And they do it with Bentley Dynamic Ride. Here’s how it works.

The tl;dr is that it’s a really fancy anti-roll bar. But this isn’t the place for a one-liner summary. This is for where you want to really understand just how it works.

So first we’ll need to cover the anti-roll bar (or the “stabilizer bar,” or “sway bar” depending on who you ask). Many names, one function. To stop the body of the vehicle from rolling in a curve, thereby keeping the suspension working in its proper operating range.

In its simplest form, it’s pretty much just a steel bar. Usually with a few bends in it. The bar is attached to the suspension on both sides of the axle. Left and right. It could be attached to the strut or the control arm, but it works the same either way. Finally, the bar is attached to the body or a subframe (which in turn is attached to the body or frame).

The bar will have a straight section–or mostly straight section–with an arm on each end. The length of the arm, and where it’s located on the suspension, decide how much force the bar exerts on suspension movement.

When both wheels move up or down at the same time–like when you hit a dip or a bump–the bar rotates in its body-mount bushings. In that case, the bar isn’t actually doing much. The wheels move up and down as if there was nothing there. When one wheel moves and the other doesn’t, that’s when the magic happens.

Turn left, and momentum leads to weight transfer to the right. That pushes the right-side suspension down and the body rolls. When it rolls, the left-side suspension moves in its travel too. Now, depending on how much suspension travel the car has, the tires are no longer parallel to the ground. Instead of using the car’s full contact patch, you’re only using part of it. And all that body roll is uncomfortable for passengers. Especially if the suspension compressed fully on the loaded up right side. Hit a bump and there’s nothing to absorb it except your butt.

 

With an anti-roll bar, when the right front wheel moves up and the left wheel moves down, the bar twists, like a spring. It takes a lot of force to twist a steel bar. Go ahead and try, we’ll wait.

The twisting force on the bar pushes back on the wheel that’s trying to move down. So it moves less. Both wheels stay closer to the middle of the car’s suspension travel. The car rolls less.

Automakers can use different thicknesses of bar, different attachment points, and different lengths of the arm that attaches to the suspension to modify how much stiffness, called roll stiffness, the bar adds.

The base model might have a bar half the diameter of the sporty version. Or if it’s in the rear of the car, none at all.

The problem with the anti-roll bar is that it’s attached to both wheels. I mean, that’s how it works, but it’s also the problem. See, when just one wheel moves, like hitting a bump, it puts a sudden force into the other side of the vehicle through the bar. In short, it rides more jarringly. It also limits how far one wheel can travel, relative to the one it’s attached to via the bar. The left side can’t droop or compress all the way unless the right side is doing the same thing.

So what if you could disconnect the bar on demand? That’d be perfect. What if you could do that in just 0.06 seconds? And for good measure, what if you could put your own force on the bar, instead of relying on the wheels moving? That’s Bentley Dynamic Ride.

 

Bentley stuck an electric motor in the middle of the bar. Since you can only get so much force out of a 48-volt electric motor (not enough), they added a planetary gear set like an automatic transmission to multiply the torque.

When the Bentleys that use the system, like the new Bentayga, corner, the computer adds torque to the bar thanks to the electric motor. Up to 959 lb-ft. If the body is rolling to the right, the motor twists to counter that, keeping it level, which is a big challenge in a 5,340 lb luxury SUV. It uses sensors that monitor steering angle, wheel position, and cornering forces.

On a smooth road, it can relax the bar. When a single wheel hits a bump, the opposite wheel isn’t affected. The computer can even exert an upward force on the wheel that’s hitting the bump. So instead of dropping into a pothole and smacking into the other side, the wheel lifts up and almost misses the bump completely.

Even better for the new Bentayga, when the SUV goes off-road… Wait. Do drivers really take their $300k SUVs off-road? Well, Bentley thinks they do, so we’ll go with it. When the Bentayga takes to the rough stuff, the bar can be disconnected completely. That lets each wheel move as far as the air suspension will let it. So it can climb over rocks and logs without putting a wheel in the air. (unless it’s a really big rock). Disconnecting the anti-roll bars makes the ride much more comfortable as well.

So that’s how Bentley’s Dynamic Ride can both improve ride comfort and benefit handling. The automaker says it’s the first 48-v active anti-roll bar. Though Lexus uses a 42-volt system to do something similar on the Land Cruiser, so it might be splitting, uh, wires, there a bit.

The post How Bentley Dynamic Ride Cushions On-Road and Conquers Off-Road appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex https://ift.tt/2zH9RmT
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...