40 years ago, Bose invented electromagnetic suspension for cars. It was expensive even for brands like Ferrari

There are few things more annoying than potholes in the road. Either because of noise or because of the wobble inside. Imagine, however, that there was a suspension system as if nature had forgotten to apply physics. The truth is that you don’t have to imagine that much, since Bose – yes, the company that manufactures headphones and other audio systems – came up with a suspension almost 40 years ago that seems like magic.

This is electromagnetic suspension for automobiles, a technology so revolutionary and absurdly expensive that it prevented its commercial applications. Until now.

A little context. Before thinking about what led an audio equipment manufacturer to investigate a suspension system for cars, you have to look at where Bose is coming from. Founded in 1964 by Amar Gopal Bosefrom the beginning specialized in audio equipment different from what was on the market. An example was the 2201, a speaker that consisted of 22 other speakers that were pointed not at the listener, but at the wall with the intention of having the sound bounce back as it does in a concert hall.

It was a fiasco, but it showed what the intention of its founder was. Amar Bose was a businessman who dedicated a good part of his 83 years (45, specifically) to working as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. It was there where he also studied and, in 1964, he turned to investors to obtain the capital necessary to found his company. Over time successes came, but that 2201 showed that Bose did not want to follow the market guidelines.

Intuition. Amar was so committed to research that, in 2011, he donated the majority of Bose shares to MIT to further the institution’s research work. He once stated that he entered the business world “to be able to do things that had not been done before” and argued that his greatest innovations were not the fruit of rational thought, but of intuition.

Maresca. These two elements are very important to understand the story, because as a result of that intuition, the desire to do new things and his commitment to research, Bose wanted to hire Bob Maresca. Maresca was a student at MIT and majored in electrical engineering. After listening to Bose in one of his lectures at the center, he was delighted, and it seems that this relationship was mutual.

In 1980, and as we read on CNET, Bose tried to sign Maresca. The company’s plan was to put him to work on passive speakers, but Maresca rejected the offer because… he wasn’t interested. He liked electronics, magnetism and control systems, so he went to work at Philips. But Bose seemed to want Maresca at all costs and, in 1986, they repeated the offer. He accepted.

Project Sound. The reason was that, now, the company did not want Maresca to work in the audio department, but on a Project Sound that… well, it does have to do with comfort and noise, but it was not related to the speakers. It was something that attracted Maresca because of the difficulty of the project: an electromagnetic suspension system for cars. And they specifically wanted Maresca because one of Bose’s tasks at MIT was researching ‘exotic’ suspensions and he considered Maresca to be ideal to achieve it.

We are not talking about a suspension system like the Maglev, but about something that would allow traveling by car with the greatest possible comfort, and that meant eliminating wobble on the road due to changes in direction, braking and potholes.

Success. In the interview with CNET, Maresca comments that he would not have accepted if there had not been the possibility that it was impossible (he liked challenges, wow), but after years of working on the project, the system was completed. And it was a success, as we can see in this video:

In it, we have the same Lexus LS400 car with the same load and engine, but while in one the conventional suspension system is mounted, in the other we have the Bose Project Sound. It almost seems like magic, but it was still an active suspension system.

a work of art. Comfort was the goal of this system and the idea was for it to work without putting any pressure on the bodywork. Thus, and how explained In a 2004 New Atlas article, the heart was a linear electromagnetic motor installed in each wheel. Inside this motor there are magnets and coils to which electrical energy is applied that retracts and extends the system. It was designed to respond quickly, so that it could counteract the effects of bumps and bumps with enough speed that, even during aggressive maneuvers, passengers would not notice anything.

Everything was controlled by a computer that, using algorithms, calculated the force that should be applied to the engines so that they responded in the best way to the road and the consumption of the entire system required less than a third of the energy required by a driving system. air-conditioning. Additionally, Bose designed the system so that it could be installed in a conventional vehicle with minimal modifications.

Half. In the aforementioned 2004 article, Bose stated that it hoped that some high-performance car manufacturer would adopt the system and said that the technology would be on the road within the next two years. It wasn’t like that.

But, if it was so good and brands like Jaguar, Honda, Ferrari or Mercedes were interested in the system, why after almost 40 years are street cars still without this damping system? The answer is simple and you may be imagining it: it was very expensive and also heavier than conventional suspension systems, so this revolutionary technology was put in the drawer.

ClearMotion comes into play. Now, it is difficult for such a revolutionary technology to be forgotten overnight, and ClearMotion is not going to let it die so easily. This companybased in Boston with development and manufacturing centers in the United Kingdom and China respectively, has been developing its own version of Project Sound for a decade. The result is the CM1, or Activalve, a system based on an electrohydraulic core in which the software controls everything: from the electronics to the electrohydraulics and the control software.

Like Bose in their day, they also have a video in which they compare the performance of the factory suspension of current high-end cars (a Mercedes E300 or an Audi Q7) and their system CM1. The result is impressive, but it is still something that we have already seen before in the example of Lexus and Bose.

And Porsche. Something interesting about ClearMotion is that it takes up Bose’s baton not only in the active suspension system, but in that philosophy that, surely, led Amar Bose to devise this system: noise cancellation. In fact, it is something very similar to the active noise cancellation that we have in current headphones (where Bose has very good exponents) and where an algorithm is responsible for analyzing the sound waves that enter through the microphones of the headphones to, in time real, delete them.

It seems that the technology will continue its path as a system intended to be mounted in high-end cars and, in fact, ClearMotion and Porsche signed a agreement of collaboration recently to mount this active suspension, but as usually happens, over the years these improvements reach the rest of the ranges until they become completely popular.

Be careful, it was not lost. As an interesting note, it must be said that although this Bose active suspension was tremendously expensive, its development was not in vain. The company used it to make suspension systems for truck seats, a so-called system that was adopted by some American and Canadian trucks in 2010.

Now it just remains to be seen if ClearMotion and Porsche come to fruition with this technology and, if one day, it is something that is installed in cheaper vehicles.

Images | Bose, CNETClearMotion

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