Bose do more than just speakers

They’re a serious R&D outfit that will take on anything that takes their fancy. They’ve been working on active suspension for a few years. Springs and dampers are reactive. A bump in the road hits them, and the springs compress to soak up most of the jolt. The damper then slows down the decompression so the car doesn’t kangaroo down the street. No two bumps are the same severity, so even the best mechanical suspension systems can only cope best with an average bump at an average speed.

Cars roll when going around corners. Again, passive systems can only do so much. As long as the centre of gravity is above the road and the springs can be compressed, the car will lean away from the corner.

Active systems such as Bose’s take dumb mechanical components out of the equation. Springs and dampers are thrown away and replaced with computer controlled pistons that move the wheels up and down to lift them out of the way of bumps and push them into potholes. It’s trivial to ensure that a car stays level the whole way through a corner. They could even make a car lean into a corner if they wanted to.

there are two key things to get right. 1. "something" needs to read the road ahead and make sure the suspension moves at the correct time, and 2. the pistons need to be very precisely controlled and be capable of moving extremely quickly. Bose are nicely positioned to work on both problems.

Bose do very nice noise canceling headphones. They work by taking the sound wave, generating the exact opposite, and feeding it through the headphones. One cancels the other out and the wearer hears nothing. Bose treat the road surface as just another sound wave. They generate the exact opposite, and feed the output to the suspension actuators.

A conventional speaker moves a paper cone very rapidly to produce sound. The cone is attached to a magnet which is positioned inside a magnetic coil. A good speaker must very accurately and quickly move the magnet in and out of the coil to produce the best sound….. which are the same requirements that a good active suspension system needs.

Take a look at the video clip above. At the end they really start showing off. They do a Knight Rider "turbo boost" move and jump a Lexus equipped with their suspension over a kerb without a ramp.

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