Quote:
Originally Posted by medphysdave
Counter argument to this is that if your springs are stiff enough, and your high speed and low speed compression are dialed in. How much work is the EDC really going to need to do? Which begs the question. Were all the EDC naysayers correct? Ditch the EDC and get a good 3-way manual damper?
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Dave, I've had a lot of exactly the same questions especially coming from the perspective of the M2C with the fixed OE dampers and then adding EDC and wondering "was it worth it?"
To answer that question I think the best way to think about EDC vs a 3-way is use case: Any car that sees a lot of track use may be well suited to a 3-way simply because a lot of racing setups are iterative. You run them, tweak, run them, tweak, run them, and eventually you get to a point where you dial out any issues and just drive.
EDC I think is meant more for having the capability to handle ever-changing driving conditions on the road dynamically to suit whatever road and driving situation you're on. Think road trip vs. running a single track. No, it doesn't afford you the ability to maximize exactly what you want the car to be doing, but the tradeoff is letting the computer handle dynamic adjustments means you get some advantages at driving at 7/10ths or less, especially if you're doing only occasional back road or autox stuff.
If you're wanting 8/10ths or up, 3-way is probably the way to go, which I think is why people say ditch EDC. Plus, the "simplicity" of one less electronic system being replaced with manual adjustments fits the ethos of the more higher performance oriented driving.
And also re: your question about what the modes are doing, I tend to think that assumption is correct about the dynamic range of adjustments. One of the first things I noticed, aside from the ride quality being slightly better, when going to EDC was that in S and S+ the nose of the car does not dive hardly at all under hard braking. A lot of the EDC press media preaches about having better grip by dynamically adjusting the settings to the surface you're driving on. Which makes sense, if you're too heavy on any particular setting and the tire can't maintain its contact patch while keeping the car "afloat" that's not ideal. I've been driving on EDC for several months after having had the fixed OE suspension and it's definitely noticeable that there are "ranges" of what the car will do with the different modes depending on how it wants to handle high and low speed.
I don't believe EDC has true high and low speed settings, I believe that it basically PWMs its two-way single adjustment based on the accelerometers to emulate more ideal high and low speed settings as opposed to having a true independent 5 way. So, maybe thinking about it as a four-way single (double?) adjustment might be better.