Drive with Attention
It’s also worth noting that your actual driving style will also have a direct impact on your ability to protect your suspension. People who drive smoothly (i.e. accelerate and decelerate gradually, and drive smoothly into and out of corners) will find that they experience fewer mechanical issues than other drivers. This is important because your suspension works very hard, especially when cornering, so if you are a reckless driver who pushes your car to its limits when cornering, then you are putting extra stress on your suspension, which in turn will cause the system to wear out faster. Everything in car mechanics is about energy and how that energy is used or dispersed in the car. The problem here is that when an area starts to become weak, it will eventually lead to the development of more problems, which is disappointing in itself when that weakness is caused by something that could have been easily avoided, in this case, we are referring to your driving style.
So, we recommend that you take it a little easier, especially on those corners. Reduce the stress that your suspension is repeatedly subjected to, and you will greatly extend its life.
Pay Attention to the Road
The point we need to discuss is that you need to really be aware of the road conditions. It’s no secret that hitting potholes and driving over bumpy roads can have a direct impact on your suspension, as it wears out the shock absorbers, and when that happens, it puts too much stress on the entire system.
You need to remember what happens when you hit a pothole. The purpose of the shock absorbers is to mitigate the impact associated with potholes and bumps in the road, but a pothole is a short, sharp shock that creates a lot of energy within the suspension, pushing them to their limits.
The job of the shock absorbers is to disperse the energy created by potholes in the road, but if you hit them repeatedly, or fail to avoid larger potholes, the energy created can be quite significant and can cause problems. How a car works is pretty simple. The shock absorbers are effectively like a protective barrier for the main suspension system, so it’s obvious that if that protective barrier wears down over time, then it can start to subject the main suspension system to a lot of additional damage that it wasn’t exactly designed to withstand. You can start to see that driving over bad roads repeatedly will inevitably lead to problems with your suspension, so being more alert to road conditions is definitely something you can do to help protect your suspension.
Finally, take good care of it
The last point we need to mention here is that it is very important to check your shock absorbers and suspension system at the first sign of any potential problems or just as part of general maintenance. The idea behind this is that you can change these shocks at the first sign of any weakness as this means that you are in turn protecting the entire system and stopping things from getting worse than they already are. Think of this as a preventative measure more than anything else; but one thing we can assure you is that it is much cheaper to replace the shock absorbers when they first start to become damaged than to replace them when the entire suspension suddenly decides that it has been damaged. The suspension needs maintenance and the responsibility of maintaining it falls on you. Drive carefully, avoid potholes, and improve your driving style, and not only will the suspension perform better, but you will also have fewer general mechanical issues plaguing your car.
