Looking at the 2022 advance model and it has the adaptive dampers. I'm not familiar with this feature in term of reliability and maintenance. Is there any additional care required for the adaptive dampers or treat it like a regular shock/strut setup?

 

This...the bold.

I suspect they will be quite pricey when time to replace (post warranty)

 

yes, they will be. Any additional complexity you get increases chances of it going bad in the long term. Good news we do not see massive issues with adaptive dumpers yet, things could be different 10yrs from now.

 

Looking this from another angle, the adaptive front damper is similarly priced as non-adaptive one. Only the rear damper is more expensive. The ADS ECU is unlikely to fry itself before anything else, so in the worst case when the dampers need replacing, the cost is not too bad.

 

When i checked the dampers on the parts websites were only around 300 a piece. Thats not bad at all really.

 

I know it's not what you asked - but they are VERY GOOD and worth an extra couple hundred bucks extra if you have have to replace one. Behind the seats and the stereo, the handling is my third favorite thing about my car, and the adaptive dampers are a significant part of that.

 

I wonder what sort of signal they take to change their damping. If it was simple (e.g. 4-20mA), it wouldn't be difficult to DIY upgrade.

 

i paid $25 for the service manual to look at some other things. for this, looks like 0-1.6a. pretty nice dyno graph there. the position of the 0A curve is interesting. pretty digressive curve on the two firmest profiles.

 

here's how they work:

 

Very nice, did not know the service manual provides this level of details. Does it show the damper dyno for 19-21 and 22 separately, or just one plot? Does it say about any change to the non-adaptive dampers for 22?

 

The harnesses are the difficult part - if you use factory controller, you need to hook up the controller to the CAN gateway, and then to the four dampers. The wires to the CAN gateway are bundled in the center console harness, and the damper ones are bundles in the floor harness. Acura simply do not want us to retrofit the adaptive dampers. You can save the CAN gateway harness if you make a control box that provides fixed current, but IMHO if you already go this far, might as well spend the effort figuring out how to hook up the factory controller.

 

Just one plot. Nothing about changes, i think its just the software profile that changed. The manual does do a good job of distinguishing where there are differences. For example the aiming target for the radar changed by 3mm for the 2022. No idea why. A little heavier car maybe?

 

That's interesting info. What manual is that in and where did you get it?

 

https://techinfo.honda.com/rjanisis/logon.aspx

$25 for one-day access to the Service Manual and all TSBs. you can download pretty much the whole thing in pdf format if you spend the time. each section is its own PDF, and the sub-procedures you have to save as single webpages. I saved quite a bit pertaining to alignment and suspension torque specs and what not. definitely worth it if you have a list of things you want to know about.