How do stabilizer bars work?

Stabilizer bars are designed to keep your car from rolling when you make sharp turns. Learn more about how these bars work in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com
where smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,

(00:29):
how do stabilizer bars work? Stabilizer bars are part of
your car's suspension system. There's sometimes also called anti sway
bars or anti roll bars. Their purpose in life is
to try to keep your car's body from rolling in
a sharp turn. Think about what happens to a car
in a sharp turn. If you're inside the car, you

(00:53):
know that your body gets pulled towards the outside of
the turn. The same thing is happening to all the
parts of the car. So the part of the car
on the outside of the turn gets pushed down towards
the road, and the part of the car on the
inside of the turn rises up. In other words, the
body of the car rolls ten or twenty or thirty

(01:13):
degrees toward the outside of the turn. If you take
a turn fast enough, the tires on the inside of
the turn actually rise off the road and the car
can flip over if you do it hard enough. Roll
is bad. It tends to put more weight on the
outside tires and less weight on the inside tires, reducing traction.
It also messes up steering. What you would like is

(01:36):
for the body of the car to remain flat through
the turn, so that the weight stays distributed evenly on
all four tires. A stabilizer bar tries to keep the
car's body flat by moving force from one side of
the body to the other. To picture how a stabilizer
bar works, imagine a metal rod that's an inch or

(01:56):
two in diameter. If your front tires are five to part,
make that rod about four ft long. Attach the rod
to the frame of the car in front of the
front tires, but attach it with bushings in such a
way that it can rotate. Now, attach arms from the
rod to the front suspension member on both sides when

(02:17):
you go into a turn. Now, the front suspension member
on the outside of the turn gets pushed upwards. The
arm of the sway bar gets pushed upward, and this
applies torsion to the rod. The torsion then moves the
arm on the other end of the rod, and this
causes the suspension on the other side of the car
to compress as well. The car's body tends to stay

(02:40):
flat in the turn. If you don't have a stabilizer bar,
you tend to have a lot of trouble with body
roll and a turn. If you have too much stabilizer bar,
you tend to lose independence between the suspension members on
both sides of the car. When one wheel hits a bump,
the stabilizer bar transmits the entire or bumped to the

(03:00):
other side of the car as well, which is not
what you want. The ideal is defined a setting that
reduces body roll but does not hurt the independence of
the suspension. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for
this podcast? If so, please send me an email at
podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff

(03:22):
works dot com and be sure to check out the
brain Stuff blog on the how stuffworks dot com home page.
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