Edit: Wow thanks for all of the great responses, I was watching Goodfellas and was looking at the cars bouncing all over the place and thinking why was that. I’d love to drive in one to experience it someday.
In: 3156
Seeing as so far no other top level comments seem to have explain what might actually make a car bouncy/the basic physics behind it I’ll give it a go:
Springs on their own aren’t enough to make good suspension. Compressing a spring stores energy, energy that is returned as the spring decompresses. A bump in the road will compress the spring but after the bump the spring will immediately return to normal releasing that energy in a bounce back up, worse it can start to oscillate up and down as there’s nowhere for the energy to go.
The solution: introduce a method to absorb or dampen that energy. This is the role that the shock absorbers on your car play.
So, why some cars are bouncy but others are not? The bouncy cars are inadequately damped, maybe due to excessive weight, bad/underengineered design or aging components (failed shock absorbers can cause a car to bounce quite dramatically). It’s just another area where modern cars are so exceptionally well engineered so comparing older cars isn’t exactly fair. Modern suspension has a hundred years of development behind it by this point
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