I apologize in advance but I have a newb to coilovers question for either
@RedwoodMotors or anyone else with experience. Given that these are height adjustable, how easy is this to do at home? Would I just be able to raise the car, remove the tire and make the adjustment or is it more complicated and possibly require a trip to a shop?
I’m interested in lowering my P3D 1-1.5” and I’m reluctant to use springs after having adjustable air suspension on my previous car. I like the idea of being able to raise the rear .5” for example if I am going on a trip and know the car will be loaded with people and luggage. I’m also interested in the ride quality and it sounds like these would be really nice coilovers in that regard as well.
Thank you for any info anyone can provide.
While you can adjust height at home, every time you do you will change your alignment settings, and therefore will need to get re-aligned. I would recommend picking a useable height for your average use-case for the car and sticking with that. Damping settings can be adjusted at any time however.
As far as ride quality and handling goes, the Ohlins compared to an air suspension setup it's really not comparable in any way, and on a completely different end of the spectrum.
Do you guys install? Im up in Montclair, about 20 mins away from you lot.. Also, what about ride height drop, is this easy? up and down? Up for standard road duty and low for the occasional track day?
We do have installation services available in house, in addition to digital alignment, corner balancing, etc. We have a 4 bay fully equipped shop with two certified technicians, familiar with race prep and setup - we are a block from the Tesla Factory. In the future, we will be opening a Tesla-Dedicated wing as well!
So, if I'm never tracking the car, have a sports car for the weekend, live in an area with not a lot of twisties and lot s of straight concrete highways plus nasty broken concrete pavement, but still want the car to have that sporty older BMW feeling like an E46 M3 or an E39 M5, sounds like the Grand Tourings with the shocks set to the stiffer range of the settings? Or better off going for the Performance Sports and dialing them all the way soft? I just DON"T want a floaty ride.
Thanks.
I would say the Performance setup would be closer to the E46 M3. However, like you said, you can crank up the damper knobs stiffer on the GT kit, which would still give you an overall higher ride quality for day to day use, but the tradeoff is a more body roll cornering. Neither setup will give you a floaty ride, and are light years beyond the OEM dampers as far as performance goes.
Do you have any recommended installers in the western PA area?
Also do you guys offer a discount for purchase of multiple products? (coilovers + f/r control arms)
As a side note. Nice choice on the color. I'm pretty fond of orange.
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Thanks for the kind words! We are one of Ohlins very few engineering development partners... we adhere to all of their anodizing color requirements, and plating durability (Mil-Spec on wear items etc). I wish we could take credit for their orange/gold color scheme though
... but we've designed our products (engineering and looks wise) to seamlessly integrate with the Ohlins product line. We don't have a multi-purchase discount but we DO have our pre-order pricing running across the entire website currently, which is a full 10% off the entire website. We are just starting to get the major components in from our Front Camber/Caster arms in from manufacturing, and Rear Toe/Camber arms as well. The coupon code is available currently on our site
www.RedwoodMotorsports.com (once the pre-order message is gone the code will be inactive, so if you are considering a set I would recommend getting your pre-order in as we have a limited number of kits available).
I am interested to upgrade my model 3 suspensions with aftermarket Coilover. The main shock body is made by Öhlins and Redwood has modified to fit model 3. Please advise who will own the warranty of the kit?
How often do we need to rebuild the Coilover for normal street drive use?
Dampers are a wear item. Rather than trashing them, the higher end ones can be rebuilt.
This is absolutely correct. Ohlins specifically can be rebuilt here in the US with a 3-4 day turnaround time. Other dampers will be trash or not worth rebuilding (or parts will not be available in the future). That said, the Ohlins DFV is an EXTREMELY robust damper, and are OEM on a number of factory cars (check out the Volvo Polestar). We've sold over 500 sets of Ohlins in the last 10+ years, and have had literally 2 leaking dampers in that entire time (obviously on the other platforms we support) but they are extremely durable dampers as the machining tolerances are very tight. You get what you pay for when it comes to dampers, and Ohlins is the top of the list.
They only need to be rebuilt if you blow or overload valves and seals. If you're running them mostly on the street, and the shock becomes a bit softer you simply dial up the shock to a firmer setting. I've had probably 10 sets at least of adjustable shocks, and I've never had to have one of them serviced for wear ever. This despite keeping many cars many years.
That is correct for the most part... if they're not leaking they most likely do not need a rebuild. Yes dampers will age over time, so as the seals wear the damping quality will decrease, however, with the super tight tolerances the Ohlins run, we see extremely low wear and low particulate in the oil (we've done oil analysis on used shocks with 40,000 miles running the buttery smooth Ohlins 1304 Race Oil that the DFV's were designed to run (factory Ohlins use generic Yamaha shock oil) and have found negligible wear). These are truely meant to last!
benchmark of the luxury ride to me is Lexus. I need car to drive around town to run errands, go to work, and some long drive over the weekend. I'm not into sports racing nor care much about track performance. roads are bad enough in NE. That being said, which Coilover, spring can be considered equivalent of Lexus type softer ride!!??
Anyone?
The closest you'll get here would be the Grand Touring valving, which we are designed to give the most comfortable ride without wildly sacrificing handling or driving performance. To Teslas credit, the Model 3 is a very tight (and safe) car... there's not much nose-dive under braking like a Lexus for instance, which makes emergency stops squirly in an ultra-soft Lexus. However, we feel that for the damper quality Tesla was forced to use (cheap OEM dampers) they were not able to achieve a good balance between ride quality and damping performance due to high hysteresis - Ohlins can do both, and has additional tricks up their sleeve that benefit ride quality, but, you do pay for it cost wise. Eliminating cost from the equation though, you won't find a higher quality damper - which translates to both better ride quality and performance - all things equal.
MPP Comfort Coilover reviews?
Read from first to last page.
Ycwsuspension is releasing their custom coilovers for model 3, you can customize spring rate and valving curves with them. You can read more about them here.
YCW Suspension Sale: 100% Custom Valved Coilovers from $1349.95!
I’m waiting for more choices, I really like the ohlins GT too but hard for me to digest the price point for daily driving.
Those are very cheap Taiwanese coilovers. Expect a very harsh ride, low cornering performance, or both. I would not put those anywhere near a Tesla... those barely belong on a 90's Honda Civic.
Question asked on Jan 9th. Jan 21st today, no reply.. despite bump a week later. Fair dos, customer service not quite there yet..
Hey, didn't mean to leave you hanging in any way. We have been EXTREMELY busy working on R/D, testing, and assembling new components that are now arriving. If you ever need to get ahold of us quicker or have any questions please please feel free to email
[email protected] as we are not here trying to push products on the forums constantly. In the future when the dust settles we'll have more time to dedicate to interacting on the forums, but right now our focus is on engineering and R/D for our upcoming launches.
Yes we absolutely do installs here in the shop, and depending on the hardware we're installing (coilovers vs coilovers + front and rear arms, etc.) I can put together a package deal/quote for installation. Again sorry for the delay in getting back to you, we genuinely want to help everyone and answer all questions as soon as possible, but we're not monitoring forum threads as often as we will be in the future as we ramp up engineering and production of our parts.
On a positive note, our Front Camber+Caster arms are nearly finishied, our rear Camber/Toe arms are just about ready to ship, and coilovers are 90% finished!! We also just submitted our custom forged wheel for production, and are awaiting samples and physical load tests as we move through the certification processes!
