Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam@Bimmerpost
During the press reception, I managed to pull Sebastian Sauerbrei and Florian Dietrich from BMW Driving Dynamics into conversation about EPS and to gauge their honest opinion of this technology's benefit to the enthusiast. I wanted to know whether the switch to EPS was purely for the sake of improving fuel efficiency (which it does, slightly) or whether it gave the enthusiast driver any tangible benefits.
Florian explained that unlike the hydraulic system, EPS gives the vehicle dynamics engineer far more parameters to modify and a more consistent platform to do it in. He explained that hydraulic systems were quite a challenge to tune because they were quite fickle. One example he gave was that they would vary in response to temperature. Your steering feel while the system is cold is quite different than the feel it gives when it's warm and this presents challenges to the engineer. EPS tends not to suffer from these types of variations. He further assured me that the common criticisms of EPS aren't necessarily inherent to the technology itself, but rather with how it is tuned. He was confident that the steering system in the M235i would give me the type of feel I am after because they've tuned it with the enthusiast driver in mind.
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I've been screaming about this for some time now. EPS isn't bad because it's a flawed premise; it's bad because no one has put in the effort to make it good. I think we've got a lot to look forward to with the M3/M4.