Remember the “leaping Lexus” developed by Bose? Back in 2004 the audio electronics company revealed an active suspension system and installed it on a first-gen Lexus LS400. The results were extraordinary. The car exhibited zero body roll, even under heavy braking, in a slalom, or over bumps. For its most impressive party trick, the Lexus jumped over a six inch high piece of lumber. Recently, that exact prototype showed up for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
The system was started at the Framingham, Massachusetts engineering firm in 1980 and spent nearly a quarter-century under development. According to a Car and Driver article at the time, Bose engineers began with how they thought the ideal car suspension should behave. Then they developed the system, which consisted of electromagnetic motors at each wheel.
The motors operated in an up-and-down motion, in long cylindrical tubes with up to 8.5 inches of travel that replaced the stock suspension. An array of sensors measured the overall car’s motion, as well as the forces acting upon each wheel. A computer, capable of over 100 responses per second, then proactively raised or lowered each wheel to compensate for bumps and body roll. The result was the Lexus’ ability to glide over surfaces like a “magic carpet”. Bose had hoped to market the system to an automakers, but due to cost and weight it never saw production.
Earlier this month Bose’s prototype Lexus, a 1994 LS400, appeared on Facebook Marketplace in Massachusetts. The car had been stripped of its unique suspension pieces, but a large trunk-mounted computer and many custom components remained. According to The Drive, after the Bose project was scrapped its patents and assets were sold to a company called ClearMotion in 2017. That included three Lexus LS400s: the gray one serving as the stock comparison car in the videos above, the white prototype in the video, and a third prototype also fitted with the active suspension.
A ClearMotion engineer named Tim McVay purchased the cars after the company decided it no longer wanted to store them, the article states. He currently dailies the stock gray car and uses the third prototype for parts, but decided to put the white star car up for sale. The car has since sold, and the new owner plans to swap its 1UZ V8, which has only 53,079 miles according to the ad, into a 1995 4Runner project.
The Bose project wowed the public when it was unveiled, and every few years clips from the demos show up on social media to be rediscovered by a new audience. It’s a bit sad to see the prototypes meet their fates as parts cars, but as McVay told The Drive, Bose had developed bespoke subframes, control arms, brakes, and fully billet-machined spindles.
Those parts were likely never meant to see extensive miles, and would have been irreplaceable if damaged. It would have been impossible to get the whole system running again, especially since ClearMotion insisted that the trick suspension be removed as a condition of the sale. As a result, the story of Bose’s innovative suspension ends here, but it’s not surprising that the stock LS400 in the demo videos is still going strong some three decades later.
This is so long ago. It is extremely surprising that updated technology still hasn’t replicated even a small part of this feature in current ultra luxury cars or suvs. Why has this gone missing in today’s cars? I would love a super smooth ride, cost restrictive of course….
I always thought it was a joint development of Lexus and Bose and not an initiative of the latter. Likewise, GM, for example, with its electromagnetic suspensions takes these concepts from what I can understand. I don’t know if the aftermarket got into this line as well as the pneumatic suspensions. I remember watching a video with Matt Farah that showed some cars with pneumatic self-leveling systems and even by GPS “they knew” when you arrived at your house and you needed it to be higher to avoid rubbing in an entrance for example. However, for some reason that must be mostly cost, this type of magnetic suspensions in Mercedes Benz are replaced by coilovers when they break due to how expensive it is to repair them (even with respect to the value of the car).
Likewise, as they mentioned, if they were installed with the Lexus quality standard they would continue to work
Toyota did learn from this tech and introduced TEMS and the modern version is available on all Lexus and luxury Toyotas called Active Stabilizer Suspension System