Autonomous Impact on Suspension Systems

This report is available to view and download now as part of the Chassis Service

Chassis technology is responsible for a vehicle’s overall performance in terms of dynamics, safety, and fuel efficiency—in short, a key contributor to a vehicle’s competitive performance. Furthermore, through the use of advanced materials, it has a significant role to play in reducing carbon dioxide output.

The IHS Markit Chassis Service provides insight, context, data, and analytics for the key chassis components—braking, steering, suspension, and tires. Users can quickly access key insights from market developments, put context around events and technology trends, dive into deep data and forecasts, and seamlessly drive analytics to support their most  challenging decisions.

About this report

The primary function of a suspension system in a vehicle is to offer comfort and optimum vehicle ride and handling. These factors fare differently for different road conditions. Past suspension systems were treated separately for varying conditions, with luxury cars offering a more comfort-oriented suspension and off-road vehicles offering a stronger suspension to handle surface undulations. However, today’s systems are more dynamic and adaptive to both the road and off-road driving conditions as consumers alter their driving habits to accommodate small road trips and long highway or off-road drivers.

With the autonomous era visible in the future, suspension systems have developed a secondary importance to their presence in the car as well. Their role is important in converting the car from a vessel that solely transports to becoming a workspace while transporting. Of course, the primary reason is the basis of channeling the potential of suspension systems for autonomous driving.

IHS Markit sees three main roles of the suspension in the autonomous driving era:

1. Make ride comfortable enough to do tasks while being transported, such as reading and working on laptops
2. Countering motion sickness (also a challenge)
3. To ensure a holistic comfort dynamic as the driver also becomes a passenger

In this report, we will discuss the future impact of autonomous vehicles on suspension systems, supported by key market drivers and challenges, technology development in the interim, and associated market and technology outlooks for suspension as a vehicle component and its subcomponents.

• Executive summary
  • "Less is more"     
  • Table of contents     
• Overview
  • List of figures     
  • IHS Markit definitions     
  • Methodology     
  • Introduction     
• Key findings
  • Overview     
• Technology analysis
  • Challenges and opportunities     
  • Autonomous impact on suspension technology     
  • Autonomous vehicle scenarios     
• Market analysis
• Global demand
• Regional demand
• OEM analysis