I get that the 3P attracts enthusiasts that are willing to put up with many compromises, like a harsh suspension (bmw m3), no back seat (cayman), loud engine noises, minimal storage space, expensive maintenance schedules, tires usable only in summer, etc. If I had a 3P only for fun weekend drives I'd wouldn't worry about how practical the 3P is. However I'm hoping the 3P can be a practical daily driver for most needs for a family of 3.
Given that I've had 2 issues in my first 1000 miles I'm hoping that even the paltry 10mm rise helps. Given that few cars (by volume) are this low, I suspect the 3P is lower than 99% of cars. I'm guessing even the 10mm rise puts the LR or AWD lower than 95% of autos. Sure a bag of dog food might make more difference, but I do sometimes actually travel with things in the trunk. Maybe my problem was more that it was 3 people, a 50 pound dog, and enough gear for a day of hiking (we did summit lake and back). If I'd been solo in the car those same two spots might have been problem free.
I'd worry about camber if I was using non-tesla parts to arbitrarily raise or lower the ride height. Is it really an issue if I'm using Tesla parts?
If I swap my 3P springs/shocks with AWD springs/shocks, that will invalidate some factory alignment that can't be redone by a decent garage? I'm hoping to preserve as much of the way it drives stock as possible.
I suspect my problem is that I'm not treating my 3P as a performance car. It looks nearly identical to the base m3. Sure I have different size rims (but same width tires), a tiny subtle spoiler, and red brakes. But I'm actually have the gall to go to Costco, take a family of 3 with a dog out hiking, and take everyone out to a restaurant.
So instead of driving around a parking lot looking for parking maybe I should offload the family (to gain a few mm of height) and have the redirect traffic while I slowly crawl over speed bumps one wheel at a time? Sure I'm exaggerating, but I do feel that a modest increase in height to stock will make the 3P a much more practical car at a minimum decrease in performance.
Do people only go shopping during off hours so they can take speed bumps diagonally? When things are busy it's not like there's much space to hit speed bumps at an angle.
If you follow Teslanomics on youtube, I guess I side more with Jenny (who made fun of Ben with his problems with his lowered 3) than Ben. Her number one request when the 3 became her daily car instead of his, was that it get raised back to stock and now she's pretty passionate about the 3.
I do wonder how much the BMW M3 and Caymen owners miss out on because of lack of clearance. A friend with 911 with a faster 0-60 (by spec anyways) than my 3P doesn't go up in the Sierra's with it. It's a real shame some really nice roads in the Sierras. Although I did get a double flat hugging the inside of a corner around Tahoe, but that wasn't an issue lack of ground clearance that was an issue with low profile tires/tiny sidewalls.
All technical designs are compromises and trade-offs between competing functional virtues and parameters. We get that you want more ground clearance.
Whether you use Tesla parts or not, changes in camber are intrinsic to raising or lowering ride height of a suspension. The degree of camber change probably is not going to be particularly significant on the order of 0.1 or 0.2 degrees of increased positive camber, but outside of buying customized control arms for your suspension, camber is not adjustable front or rear.. It's still not desirable, to add positive camber, particularly if your performance version already has minimal negative camber on any of its Wheels, in other words it's possible that if your car is borderline in terms of its alignment specs raising it might put it out of spec but again we don't know.
I honestly don't believe that gaining a centimeter of ride height is going to make a wits bit of difference in relationship to scenarios where you might bottom out the car. if you load the car enough and you take it over speed bumps, and you generally treat it as though it's not a performance sedan but some version of an SUV with a fancy wrapper on it, you're going to bottom it out. It seems to me a much smarter approach is simply to accommodate your driving to these limitations. You're going to pay somebody probably on the order of four to five hundred bucks to swap out an all wheel drive suspension, and that's assuming you can get somebody to donate those suspension parts and you don't have to pay Tesla for them. Otherwise you're talking on the order of $2,000. At that point your car is going to be worth less on the resale Market unless you put the Performance Suspension back in because nobody's going to want to buy it the way you have it configured. Frankly that's a colossal waste of money.
It seems to me you've got an obsessive focus on this small limitation associated with a 1-cm ride height reduction which is actually rather modest in a performance version of a sedan where a more typical lowering might be on the order of an inch or more. A much much smarter approach would be to get a coilover kit that allows you to adjust the ride height then raise it and then when you sell the car lower it to a more conventional ride height. MPP makes a Comfort coilover kit that does not hurt the handling but gives you somewhat better shocks than stock but you're going to spend some money on that. If ride height is really critical you might as well do it the right way, instead of what you're thinking about doing which frankly is at best Half Baked. Additionally you will probably recover some of your capital investment on the coilover kit because unlike what you're going to do which is going to deteriorate your resale value, the coilover kit will probably improve it, although probably not as much as you're going to spend.
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