PT Cruiser LINKS .com ... A Review - KONI Adjustable Sport Shocks

Review - KONI Adjustable Sport Shocks

Page 3 - Driving Impressions

WOW.

I hadn't realized just how tired our factory shocks were. The KONI's introduced a smoothness and control I had forgotten the car was capable of. The car's lean around corners was greatly reduced. There was some, but not nearly as much. The car turned in and aggressively followed my line like a hunting dog on a scent. Was this really the same car that I used to joke about tipping over in corners?

But how did it handle bumps and rough road? Beautifully. The bumps seemed a little more noticeable, but only because the shocks were actually doing their job now. Before, when the car hit a bump, the springs absorbed the impact but the shocks did little to control the bouncy effect. It made for a floaty, jiggley ride. Now there was just the confident thump of the spring absorbing the bump and - that was it. It was just a smooth, controlled, well-damped ride. Rough road still felt rough, but now the car handled it with control, rather than stumbling and crashing over it.

The KONI's also completely absorbed the annoying vibration that we had felt through the steering wheel since we brought the car home. We had tried everything - alignments, balancing, new tires - to try to exorcise the vibration but hadn't been able to get rid of it. Now it was completely gone Ð even before we had the car re-aligned or the new tires put on! Hallelujah!

The next day we took it down to the local tire dealer to have the new tires installed and to have the car aligned. My wife commented about how much better the car rode and handled on the way there. "It feels great!" she said. We had taken two cars so we could run some errands and I got to drive the Cruiser on the way home. The car felt great on the highway after its alignment - solid, planted, quiet. At one point, I noticed my wife was falling behind. I looked down and saw that I was doing over 90 mph. I was in awe. It sure didn't feel like 90 mph! The ride was so smooth and controlled that I had been lulled into thinking I was still running at the speed limit.

Adjusting the Shocks

Later, I adjusted the struts and shocks to firmer levels, trying different settings. The shocks and struts have two full circles of adjustment (2 x 360 degrees). The front struts adjust with a knob (the knob would make a really cool key-chain fob that would make showing off easier! See pic below) and are accessed under the hood. There aren't any clicks as you adjust. They just glide smoothly with the faintest bit of resistance. The back shocks are a little more involved. First, you need to remove the rear wheels and undo the bottom eyebolt on the shock. Then you compress the shock upwards and turn the bottom portion in the same increment of adjustment as the front. This was my only hang-up with the design. It's far from convenient. According to the KONI rep there's no ideal solution that would allow a different adjustment method while retaining KONI's superior performance.

There's no room for the adjustment knob in the back because Chrysler designed the shock to bolt tightly to the frame. Looking in the wheel well, there wouldn't be any room to turn the knob and even if you could there wouldn't be any way to see how far you'd turned it. A side-adjust knob, like some shocks have, wouldn't allow KONI to engineer a shock durable enough to meet KONI's exacting standards and performance expectations.

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