A higher seating height and CG will exaggerate the angle the car tilts for a given spring rate and the distance your body moves laterally and vertically for a given angle.
This is why when I go around an onramp even at a pretty tame speed in a minivan or SUV my body is all code brown!
Buy a crappy old 4x4 from the 60's and see just how fast highway speed can really feel.
Tom1200 said:The fastest I've been in a car was a friend's Maverick with a horribly worn front end. The car was so busy at 65 mph it was near terrifying.
That's a colorful way of putting it!
I don't think it's just a height thing by any means. 80 in the Jeep feels fast, as it's noisy, you can notice speed in how the steering responds, etc. And with the aero drag, short-ish gearing and big engine, it slows down very quickly when you let off the gas at that speed.
Unless there are other cars around to give a speed reference, doing 80 in the much lower to the ground E38 feels very slow. Like look down to make sure you're not doing 30 kind of slow. It's only geared a little taller, but the engine is very smooth and quiet at higher revs, so you don't really notice the revs getting up there unless you look down or are leaning on the throttle enough to hear and feel the shape of the powerband. Wind and road noise in that car is also much lower and doesn't increase quickly with speed. And steering wise, at high speeds, you don't really notice much. It's just kinda like driving a cruise missile.
Height definitely impacts the perception of cornering forces though. In the BMW, pushing it right to the limits doesn't seem sketchy. In the Jeep, even with somewhat lower limits, I usually reach the feeling of "uh, is this going to end badly?" before actually hitting the limits.
My FiST is sneeky, It tends to gain speed and I don't even notice it until I look at the speedometer.
I use cruise control a lot.
Ever drive a CJ5 flat out ? Slow but do you want to go any faster.
You'll need to log in to post.
