I arrived for my meetup with Wayne Wells driving a Honda Fit, a vehicle that resembles a 1990s computer mouse. The Fit is a great car in many ways, but as I parked it next to the Renegade RV Veracruz, it was like putting a chipmunk in a rhinoceros’s zoo habitat. Wayne was about to hand me the Renegade’s keys. With a GVWR of 19,500 lbs and huge all-terrain tires on the Ford Super-Duty F-550 chassis, this would be the biggest ride I’d ever tried to keep between the white lines.
Fortunately, Wells works for LiquidSpring, makers of technically advanced suspension systems, as head of sales for the company’s RV products. The Renegade was equipped with a LiquidSpring system, which uses compressible silicon liquid and computer power to cushion, buffer and smooth the road, wheel by wheel, millisecond by millisecond. I was glad for it.
On the roads of southwest Washington State, we dealt with a variety of driving conditions, from suburban rush-hour traffic to high-speed two-lane highway to turns made hectic by other drivers. The LiquidSpring Smart Suspension, which I could control and monitor via a dashboard-mounted interface screen, made the Veracruz sail with grace. Wells explained how the suspension absorbs the road’s energy, how it corrects for crosswinds (or passing semis).
Photo Credit: LiquidSpring
The LiquidSpring system’s algorithm processes the physical inputs about a thousand times per second. Instructions to struts vary the stiffness of each individual wheel, more or less instantly, by changing the amount of the hydraulic fluid available to the struts to fine-tune the ride. Carl Harr, the company’s director of sales and marketing, would tell me that the 500 cubic inches of liquid aboard could compress down by 6 percent. “We can adjust in 40 milliseconds,” Harr told me. “For a wide, sweeping turn, the response would be a pulse.If the driver jerks the wheel, the system closes the rate valve to adjust.” When we parked, the system’s Tru-Earth function corrected the big beast’s natural lean, leaving it level.
LiquidSpring started in 2004, making suspensions for equipment used in open-pit mining. It moved on to the rigorous world of emergency response; the company outfits about 97 percent of ambulances in North America. In RVs, the company builds systems for Class A and Class C vehicles, a stand-by name in the field. With its base in Lafayette, Indiana, the company is close to the RV industry’s manufacturing heartland and Purdue University’s top-notch engineering program.
Photo Credit: LiquidSpring
I walked away from the Renegade feeling like I’d experienced a minor technological miracle. You could almost say that with LiquidSpring aboard, anyone could drive this thing.
This article originally appeared in Wildsam magazine. For more Wildsam content, sign up for our newsletter.
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