Tech Analysis: The 2024 Tesla Model 3 Highland Packs Several Chassis Upgrades
There’s more to Tesla’s updated and upgraded entry electric car than meets the eye.
You can learn a lot about a car by paying attention to what its engineers fix with a midcycle facelift. In the case of the 2024 Tesla Model 3 Highland, the main upgrades focus on refining the old car's cabin, but if you look deeper, you'll find several small but meaningful suspension and chassis changes aimed at delivering more driving refinement. Combined, these improvements reveal how Tesla went after a more comfortable and quieter ride with the updated 2024 Model 3, building on the interior changes to create a more upscale-feeling car.
Softer Springs and Smarter Suspension Dampers
Both the Standard Range and Long Range versions of the new 2024 Tesla Model 3 Highland ride on softer springs and new frequency-response suspension dampers for a more comfortable ride than the old version offered. The shocks are a low-cost, low-tech alternative to adaptive dampers that still alter the damping force based on suspension inputs. There's no magic magnetic fluid or electronic valves at play here. Instead, the fluid-flow through the valving changes based solely on pressure differentials inside the shock. Softer damping at low frequencies dissipates large, hard impacts from dips, heaves, and potholes using more of the suspension travel. Higher-frequency inputs are dispensed with stiffer damping to reduce annoying jiggling and jostling over expansion joints or wavy pavement.
Also called frequency-selective damping, there's some clever engineering in this technology, but it's neither new nor exotic. Koni developed the idea in the late 1990s and claims it has put more than 1.5 million vehicles on the road with frequency-selective dampers, and it's just one supplier among more than a half dozen companies with patents on selective-frequency valves.
A Change of Direction
Like the car it replaces, the 2024 Tesla Model 3 uses a variable-ratio steering rack. As the driver dials in more steering, the car becomes more responsive. The idea behind a variable-ratio rack is that slower on-center steering supports more relaxed and more confident straight-line cruising, while a quicker ratio near the end of the steering rack means the driver can use less steering lock for tight parking-lot maneuvers.
With the 2024 Model 3 Highland, however, engineers slowed down the steering across the range, meaning a driver needs to input more steering than before to make the same turn. Tesla wouldn't share the slowest and quickest ratios for the old and new car, but it did reveal that the "overall" ratio increased from 10.3:1 to 10.6:1. The goals with these changes are more linear steering response and better predictability and stability, particularly at higher speeds.
