Essential Tips for Driving a Lowered Car in the City
Driving through the city already requires various tips, such as watching the walkways for groups of pedestrians on their morning commute. If you have a lowered car, it’s important to be extra mindful of certain problems during your drive. Luckily, these tips should be familiar to you, but require sharper attention to detail since your car is lower to the ground. In other words, when you make adjustments to your vehicle, sometimes, you have to adjust how you handle road hazards. Learn how to handle the road easily by using these essential tips for driving a lowered car in the city.
Watch for Speed Bumps
Lowering a car is an effective way for enthusiasts to enhance their ride; it’s ideal for creating a smooth experience that fits their daily driving and overall aesthetic needs. However, lowering your car also means you must consider what passes underneath your car—the road and everything on it. Speed bumps are common in the city and can create a rough ride for many cars, especially when drivers aren’t paying attention. Having your suspension closer to the ground doesn’t help, but that certainly doesn’t mean you can’t drive in the city with a lowered car.
Remember, don’t let this scare you away from lowering your car—if your car touches a speed bump, it will be okay. This tip comes down to keeping an eye out for speed bumps and adjusting your speed to accommodate and avoid damages. Unless the road obstacles in your town are akin to a Mario Kart map, riding over speed bumps with grace will be fairly easy. Plus, as you’ll learn below, speed bumps aren’t the only obstructions you’ll watch for after the lowering suspension.
Assess Road Damage Carefully
Driving through the city and coming across a pothole or other form of damage isn’t uncommon in many major cities. Unfortunately, the lower your car is to the ground, the more risk of damage there is to certain components when hitting uneven surfaces.
Of course, the smallest bump in the road isn’t going to smash your suspension to bits, so start paying more attention to the damage in the road as you drive. After all, the road is where you should be looking anyway, so this new tip shouldn’t be too far outside of your wheelhouse. As with speed bumps, potholes aren’t helpful to any vehicle, so learning to avoid these obstructions is something many drivers do early on.
Is the hole large enough to substantially impact your wheel? Are the cars in front of you jolting as they hit the obstruction, or do they handle it with ease? Do you have time to move out of the way smoothly and safely, if necessary?
Details like these will help you prevent a pothole from hurting your new suspension system. Luckily, if you drive around the same roads each day, as many do, then you should become more in-tune with road damages in your area as you pay more attention to such details. As a result, slowing down and avoiding those potholes will feel like second nature instead of a distraction. Suffice it so say that distractions are best avoided when driving, especially in a city.
Remember Your Angles
Approaching inclines and slopes on the road requires care. This step is crucial because approaching a slope with a lower car straight-on and too quickly won’t end well for the front bumper. When your car is lowered with aftermarket parts and approaches a particularly high part of the road, the substantial height difference can result in contact between the bumper and slope. In such situations, approach the slope slowly and with your wheels at an angle instead of straight, ensuring they can meet the road before the bumper does.
Then, once your tires are firmly on the incline, you’re clear to straighten out and drive upward successfully. Think of this step like you would when pulling into a parking spot and avoiding the curb ahead of you; it requires analyzation, but it’s far from a laborious task. As you can see, these essential tips for driving a lowered car in the city can help you avoid simple mistakes on the road. Now that you’re up to speed on these key tips, let’s break down the best tools for lowering your vehicle.
Ways To Lower Your Car
If you’re still planning the perfect way to lower your car, you can use various methods. For example, performance coilovers can help with adjusting ride height, camber, and more suspension characteristics. Quality coilovers deliver on performance, but they can also help with aesthetics, too. Not only do the coilovers themselves feature intriguing designs, but their ability to adjust height can also help with meeting aesthetic preferences. Coilovers accomplish striking visual appeal in different ways, whether it comes to wheel gap or the overall position of the vehicle.
You can also lower your car using performance lowering springs. A set of lowering springs simplifies the design down to adjusting ride height and, thus, aesthetics. Moreover, lowering springs are the more cost-effective option on the market. So, if your budget is tight, don’t worry; lowering springs will still get the job done, but it will have fewer features. Whether or not you need those features boils down to what you’re looking for from your car’s new performance.
Benefits of Lowering Your Car
Given that you must analyze road conditions carefully when driving a low car, you might be wondering what the benefit of the titular task is in the first place. As mentioned above, suspension upgrades, including adjusting ride height, help drives personalize their car’s appearance, whether it be for a show or riding on the road. Furthermore, lowering your car impacts its center of gravity, which directly affects body roll.
If you want your car to handle turns in a consistently smoother way, then consider using lowering springs or coilovers. You can experience the same effects when hitting the brakes suddenly—responsive, but not harsh. Thanks to the stiffer springs on lower cars, tweaking your suspension also assists with rider experience. Simply put, you can experience a comfier ride in a lower vehicle, especially if you optimize it for common road conditions.
