[beau_g]

Speed bumps are much rougher in my idiot monster truck than they are on my Mercedes station wagon, idiot monster truck spring rates and damping are engineered to tow heavy loads/carry heavy payloads so especially when unloaded speed bumps are quite jarring compared to a passenger car.

[potato3732842]

Except for the fact that the in the average case the monster truck is probably being driven by someone who'll full send it (which minimizes the bump) and the Mercedes is being driven by someone who'll inevitably crawl over it at 2mph.

But yeah, swap the average drivers and the Mercedes is gonna do way better.

[nikisweeting]

Just hit them significantly faster, it'll do the same thing as going slow with a heavy load. There's a reason the faster you ride motocross the harsher you tune your spring and damping rates.

[mikrotikker]

My riding skill improved so much the day I fully grokked "lean back and twist the throttle" to handle obstacles (I did it by accident and thought I was going to die)

[serf]

what's the reason? it surely isn't ride smoothness, it's control.

similar to a race car -- you don't compensate the speed with damping and spring rates in order to maximize a smooth ride , you do it to more quickly transfer the movement energy OUT of your car, into the ground and traction patch so that the car can remain dynamic for the next force.

this does not equate to ride quality, most race cars (and bikes) are bone-shakers.

[nikisweeting]

ride smoothness in the medium frequency range = control. if you're bouncing all over then you're weighting and de-weighting constantly, which is terrible for control.

high performance cars are mostly bone shakers at slow speeds when not in their ideal operating range. at high speeds they should level on top of it all, just watch a rally truck go over dunes or the video of an F1 wheel well stabilized to the frame of the car. sure you have low-frequency high-g-force weight transfer during acceleration/deceleration, and you have high frequency signal from the road texture, but medium frequency parking-lot-speedbump-style bouncing should not be happening at all or you're going to lose the race.

[potato3732842]

See also: unladen vs laden commercial truck, same exact principals apply just at way different speeds and weights.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Off-road trucks have better bump handling ability as their suspensions aren't configured like load handling trucks.