If you’re cold, they’re cold—bring them inside. If you live in the frigid north where snow accumulates in drifts and you are forced to park your car outside, Nio’s new SkyRide active suspension might be just the thing you need. As shown here on the new ET9, Nio’s Tesla Model S and Porsche Taycan competitor, SkyRide can independently actuate each corner to make the car move around in a shaking motion, much like a dog after a bath. It’s just so damn adorable.
So long as the snow is the extremely cold and dry powder that makes for great skiing, and not the wet and heavy snow that is so perfect for snowball fights, this feature could be a pretty cool one to have around. If you walked out in the morning and saw a foot of powder on top of your car, you could just press a button in an app and it would shake off. You wouldn’t even have to break out the ubiquitous scraper and brush us midwesterners have.
Nio’s Sky Ride features a dedicated hydraulic pump to independently control the movement of each wheel. The system is a sophisticated one, intended to keep the car level over rough and uneven terrain. The company recently put out a video that takes the old Lexus pyramid of champagne coupe glasses to a new level. Instead of showing off how smooth a Japanese V8 can idle, this video shows the Nio ET9 delivering a stack of glasses on its hood while driving over uneven speed humps. OK, I’m impressed.
There have been all kinds of active suspension advancements like this one in recent years. Porsche recently debuted a similar feature with its new Panamera sedan, creatively called Active Ride in typically creative German fashion. Mercedes made a bouncing suspension mode to get its mega SUV unstuck from a sand dune. The audio company Bose has been working on active suspension since the 1990s and installed it on a Lexus LS400 that could jump a 2×4.
This kind of active suspension is probably the future of suspension tuning for comfort, but it has so many other applications. Maybe I could finally make a car “hop a Coke can off the line” like my granddad always said his 1955 Chevy could.
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