Moderator: volvite
Are you saying that your ride is currently too harsh, as in too stiff? Or by "bumpy," do you mean bouncy? The stock suspension is really soft and bouncy. One of the first mods I did was replace the springs & shocks. It is firmer, but it is no longer bouncy like it was at stock. I can now drive over a big bump without feeling much of anything, whereas before my suspension would bottom out with a big bounce.lionbull wrote:Greetings,
I have searched and still have not found a resolution that makes sense to me. I just changed my rear shocks to blistens. The ride is no different than the old ones with 130k+ miles. I read about air lift and spring replacement but they firm up the ride. Does this not make the ride even more bumpy? I know if i got stiffer spring for my car it would get bumpier. I am a newb but I just want someone to explain to me how stiffer springs will stop the harsh bumpy ride.
Kinda like the rear end booms over a bump, unsettles the front and makes the whole truck unbalanced?lionbull wrote:It is not bouncy as in soft. It is bumpy as in harsh. It makes a bang! and bottoms out. I will at least get an alignment since i know i need it. It feels unsettled but that is a different story. Anyway, back to my rear shocks, I feels like it will rip my pathy apart sometimes, especially when it feels like its jumping around on a bumpy road.
Yes, what he and you describe is unfortunately how the truck rides stock. I've never test driven another Pathfinder that drove differently than mine did, and there was nothing mechanically wrong with mine to begin with. The OEM shocks are cheap orifice-damped affairs with lots of high speed compression damping (bad) and little low speed compression damping (also bad)...like all OEM shocks, but these were particularly awful. They also have the life of a service life of a mayfly. Add that to fairly soft springs in the rear that let you hit the bump stops on a regular basis and the ride isn't terrific.DanJetta wrote:I think what lionbull is describing is what I'm experiencing (described in another post). It's like the springs are too stiff and there's not enough give... you feel every single bump and fault in the road, right?
What year/package do you have?
CR can blow it in my mind...it's a truck. Compared to these car-based utes...yes it might ride a little rough. My wife's MDX takes the bumps better but it has 90k less miles and honestly I think it's not so much better from a jarring standpoint, but it's a lot quieter over the bumps. My PF has some pronounced "thumps" and "bangs" when hitting large bumps but it actually doesn't ride that bad in my book. I was in a 2013 Acura RDX recently that jumped around over big bumps similar to the PF.Zen_master wrote:In many of the consumer reports a harsh ride is one of the knocks on the R51 generation Pathfinder. I don't know if it is the fact I have a later model R51 or because it's an LE V8 but I consider the ride on my truck to be rather plush. It's not like driving a Buick but it is much better than my Jeep Cherokee (XJ) and in some cases it handles bumps with more grace and aplomb than my wife's 2009 TSX.
What!?DanJetta wrote:Don't underestimate the power of what you hear. I think part of why the ride feels so harsh is because everything inside the car is so cheap and rattly, so the ride is perceived as being harsher than it really is. I drove through downtown Baltimore with noise-cancelling headphones on (as a joke with my wife) and I noticed that the ride seemed a lot better. The inside no longer sounded like a giant baby rattle. Well, it did, but I couldn't hear it.
When I hit a pothole in my wife's Jetta, I only hear the suspension working. When I hit a pothole in the Pathfinder, I hear the entire dash shifting, the door internals rattling, the hatch banging and every other plastic part inside the car vibrating in some form. It sounds like an all-out collision.