What does lifting your truck/SUV do?

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I don’t know car terms, excuse me.

But if you lift the truck up, all the “under carriage” (axel, etc) stays at the same height so it’s not exactly like you have higher clearance…? Help.

In: Engineering

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are suspension lifts and body lifts.

By lifting the suspension, you gain room for more suspension travel and larger tires/wheels. Larger tires and wheels provides more overall lift for the axles and chassis and gives more ground clearance.

A body lift raises the chassis off the frame, providing room for even larger wheels/tires which will (again) give more overall clearance.

A combination of the two can allow some pretty crazy ground clearance and suspension capabilities, though trouble can arise from extreme driveshaft angles and drivetrain and suspension stressors. There are ways around most of those problems, none of which are inexpensive.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It does actually give you more clearance-you’re more likely to get your frame/body hung up than your axles in some types of off roading/conditions. Also worth noting that many vehicles don’t actually have solid axles, which means there’s not much in the middle to hang up once lifted.

If you actually need more axle clearance, you can use portal axles as a lift instead of (or in addition to) a suspension lift, as they lift the axles above the wheel rather than the truck above the axle.

Aside from clearance, a lift also gives you space to increase suspension travel, use larger wheels, and just plain keep your cab and engine bay out of things, which is important if you regularly cross water or deep mud (mudding is a whole sport by itself, even)

That said, a lot of trucks get lifted because the owner likes how they look, rather than because they actually drive them off road.