Lowering Lifts

Why lower a car or truck?
There are a couple of reasons. The first and most common reason among most non-racers is for the look. Another reason is because of the improved handling. Although, there are some consequences to lowering your car, for anyone who is serious about looks and handling, lowering your car is the way to go.

Performance!
This is the real reason that a car nut would lower their car. Aside from looking better, it is more important to have a car that handles better. A stock automobile has a suspension designed to provide comfort and to deal with any road hazards that one may come across. However, stock automobiles are farther from the ground to allow room for the suspension and therefore lose some points in the handling department with a high center of gravity. By lowering a car, you place the center of gravity much closer to ground and decrease air and wind resistance. The more important of those two is keeping the center of gravity low to the ground. This is important because it helps keep the car grounded through a turn. If the center of gravity is too high and centripetal force is too great, the car will flip or at least get tire skip. There are other things that could be done to further improve the suspension of a lowered vehicle. In a lowered car especially, it is a good idea to add strut tower and anti-roll/sway bars to stiffen the chassis (frame and body). This will help to eliminate body roll which, in a lowered car, may send the body of the car diving into the ground through a turn or at least rub the tires on the top of the wheel well. Either way, it is not a desired result.

There are a few consequences that go along with lowering a vehicle.

• First of all, no matter what you do to improve the suspension, if you lower your car, you will have to avoid going fast over large bumps such as speed bumps and railroad tracks. You must keep your eyes open for road hazards.
• Second, lowering your car will change the angle that the wheels are positioned at. If this problem is not rectified, you will wear through tires twice as fast because the force of the car will not be evenly distributed across the tire. This problem can be solved with camber kits, which are ad-on components that allow the wheel to be positioned vertically.
• Third, you may run into problems with scraping if you are carrying a lot of weight (i.e. many passengers, etc.). This will just lower your car more because it puts more force on the springs causing them to compress. Whether or not your car scrapes depends entirely on how much extra weight you are carrying and how low the car was to begin with.
• Fourth, the ride will probably not be as comfortable as it was when the car had stock suspension. This all depends on how much money and work you put into it.