Adaptive M Suspension..Is it needed?

[bsmf8x]

Originally Posted by Racer20

Marketing and development cost. The GTS had to have something that would be percieved as "racecar" in order to justify its ridiculous price tag. A KW coil-over does the job. Developing a track-level adaptive suspension would have been very expensive.

Not every adaptive suspension is automatically better than every passive suspension, but all things being equal, an adaptive suspension significantly improves the ride and handling trade-off that the engineers can achieve. There's a reason that nearly every sports or luxury car on the planet above $60k uses adaptive suspension.

What I will say is that the adaptive suspension as implemented and tuned on the 2015 F8X isn't that great. I generally don't think BMW gets it completely right except on the CS models.

To that end, some colleagues and I took a few different M3's out for a comparison drive on our local evaluation route back in October . . . there were two 2008 E92's, one with passive and one with adaptive. The adaptive one was slightly better than the passive one for both ride and handling but I would have been happy with either.

Similarly, I think you'll be fine with a passive F8X.

100% agree that this adaptive suspension is subpar

[ANILE8]

Originally Posted by Racer20

Marketing and development cost. The GTS had to have something that would be percieved as "racecar" in order to justify its ridiculous price tag. A KW coil-over does the job. Developing a track-level adaptive suspension would have been very expensive.

Not every adaptive suspension is automatically better than every passive suspension, but all things being equal, an adaptive suspension significantly improves the ride and handling trade-off that the engineers can achieve. There's a reason that nearly every sports or luxury car on the planet above $60k uses adaptive suspension.

What I will say is that the adaptive suspension as implemented and tuned on the 2015 F8X isn't that great. I generally don't think BMW gets it completely right except on the CS models.

To that end, some colleagues and I took a few different M3's out for a comparison drive on our local evaluation route back in October . . . there were two 2008 E92's, one with passive and one with adaptive. The adaptive one was slightly better than the passive one for both ride and handling but I would have been happy with either.

Similarly, I think you'll be fine with a passive F8X.

I guess I don't know what I am missing with all this amazing new tech BMW is coming out with these days.

Sadly, I'll just have to make do with my old fashioned passive 3-Way coilovers.