London Bill

Well Thanks Very much BAZ, It may have slipped past your notice that TIF has more accurate information on the JDM Soarers than all the other sites put together, seems Rand has the "options" page down at the moment.

London Bill

I have driven a few UZZ32 cars (the fully active suspension & 4 wheel steer Soarer), first impression is how slow the car is, about .5sec slower to 60mph than the SC400 but it feels much slower.

The lack of nose dive and suspension squat removes the feeling of speed, but they do not fly like a normal V8 and much slower than the 2.5 Twin Turbo.

The steering takes a bit of getting used to, high speed lane changes give the feeling that the car is "crabbing" sideways, slow speed steering makes the rear wheels steer opposite to the front which is weird.

The UZZ32 has hydraulic suspension, computer operated with yaw control, it would not be feasible to retro-fit this system without a whole donor car being available, there has to be another few hundred components involved.

Smiffie has a "32" for sale here in England if anyone wants to try swapping over the suspension/steering, also has the sat-nav/TV system installed with a reversing camera.

smiffie

I have all three, JZZ30 2.5TT, UZZ31 V8, and UZZ32 Active,
see them here.
http://www.toyotaimportsforum.co.uk/...=&threadid=499
(saves me from posting the pics again)

My first was the 31 V8, (gold) had it for about 6 months, and thought it was the nuts,
ThenI bought the TT (grey) and I now know they are the quickest of the Soarer's.

Recently I bought a 32, It was green (6M3) and is now Matallic Black. (http://www.toyotaimportsforum.co.uk/...=&threadid=278 )
will show you the full strip down and colour change.

The TT is the quickest and the most fun to drive when I want to feel like a kid again, It can be driven sedately, and is a good car to drive with the extra poke if you wanna play.

The 31 is the car, Maybe I have a nice one, I dont know, but its quick, smooth, handles great, just a good car,

The 32, wow, yup, it slower than the 31, but if you drive it hard, it does get there. the ride is the same as the 31, and it's as smooth.
BUT, the handling, it feels like the back end is getting away from you when you are cornering, (fast and slow) you can feel the back moving as you drive, wierd, at 40-100 if you want to change lanes once you turn the wheel you are there, it's almost instant, it's not a slow lane change, the whole car moves sideways.

and to watch it dance, well,

I only drive the 31, it's "My baby".

BAZ

Hey Bill....
I just wanted to see if the MASTER (bater) was watching over me!!! Actually, glad you took the bait!! I gave you the chance to get your web site info on there first!
Anyway, why can't you answer my questions???

BAZ

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GLAD I HAVE THE NICE ONE.........

smiffie

the 32 does not roll on a bend, at all.
it dont matter what speed you are at, when you brake hard it does not dip.

it just sit's there, happy, contented. alone.

I have seen under this car and the ammount of high pressure pipes going to and coming from the pump I could not count,

I have shell changed many cars in my life but this would be a nightmare, even the engines are different, positioning of the alternator, power steering pump, yes it has two, one normal and one that is so big to get it out you have to remove the enginge or the engine sub frame/cradle.

there is an extra hydraulic reservoir under the hood, christ there are to many differences to name let alone change.

I'd love to change my 31 to active and 4WS, and there are two 32's that I know of locally that are being dismantled, but, no thanks.

BAZ

Is this why the 32 is slower?

smiffie

weight and more pully's and pmps to drive I should think ??

O. L. T.

iTrader: (17)

that's awsome info, thanks! i want to SEE it dance. we need some video i bet it looks quite odd to swipe the steering back and forth and make it do a little dance

Manny

onelasttry
As mentioned above, the Soarer with the 4WS is known as an Active Soarer, model code UZZ32 of which less than 900 were made between 1991 and 1996 for the Japanese market.
All the info you could want and more is available on http://planetsoarer.com/ , a site run by an absolute Active Soarer nut, Peter Scott aka UZZ32 on here.
There are some vids there of the Active giving my TT Soarer a spanking on the twisty mountain roads (even though I've 130HP more at the wheels and run some decent aftermarket suspension) - I do get my own back on the straights. You can also see it dance.
Having driven Pete's Active Soarer, I can say it is a truly amazing feat of engineering - no squat, no dive, no bodyroll during braking, acceleration and cornering. You find yourself going around a corner casually until you look up at the speed and realise your are going way too fast for a normal car but quite safely with an Active Soarer. I believe the 4WS is an integral part of the microprocessor controller hydraulic syspension - besides the lane changes, it's difficult to differentiate the different ride between the 4WS and active suspension . Pete is also working with Andy on a Supercharger kit for Active and regular 1UZ engined Soarers with very good results to date https://www.clublexus.com/forums/sho...threadid=63871

Read up all the background and info on Planet Soarer and enjoy.

UZZ32

There are several pages about the UZZ32 on
http://planetsoarer.com
Including some cameo video appearences on the video page and a technical paper.
My car will be featured in High Performance Imports magazine. Here is an excerpt by Martin Donnon (who owns a JZZ30 400 rwhp single turbo 2.5 Soarer with custom coilover suspension - was a twin turbo):
http://planetsoarer.com/HPIUZZ32/hpiuzz32.htm


We all got rules. Rules we live by. One of mine is never to mention the two words ‘Soarer’ and ‘Handling’ in the same sentence. At least with positive connotations. Think about it for a minute, a portly Japanese luxury coupe, with only mildly sporting pretensions, is never going to be a sharp edged knife through the twisties. Doesn’t matter how much you hone it. Even my own overpowered screamer has its limits.

Push hard in your normal Airbag Soarer and it’s a grimace inducing rather than rapid experience. They howl like a freshly whooped puppy, kneel on their outside hind like a sprinter in the blocks, and push in a determined fashion towards the tumbleweeds on the verge. Keep handfuls of the over assisted steering in place, care little for the shoulders of the tyres, and ride out the tack. You will get where you are going. Maybe a little battered and bruised, but you will get there.

That’s where I figured my own Soarer had it down pat. I never said it actually ‘handled’ (didn’t want to break a rule) but when it came to desiccating a twisty my JZZ30 rewrote the rulebook. Neutral, flat, steady state cornering, tail out power on oversteer, and nothing in the way of surprises, even for the less than sensitive steerer. Drive it over a typical street though and the darned thing tries to induce internal bleeding. It rides like a buckboard, with even minute bumps in the road jarring and smashing at your vertebrate, trying to free your kidneys from captivity. Its not much fun.

Travelling that same pockmarked and potholed suburban road was what convinced me that Peter Scotts ‘Active’ Soarer was nothing more than an Airbag on Acid. It was smooth, if with somewhat sportier overtones than a windbag model, but it simply rode too well to have any ability when pointed into a corner. You know what they say about assumption being the mother of all……That was my first mistake.

Anyone that’s into Soarers in this wide brown land would have heard of Peter Scott and his beloved ‘Active’. He is an ‘activest’ in the Australian Lexus Soarer Club, ‘actively’ modifies his car, and has ‘activated’ one of the most comprehensive Soarer websites on the planet. In fact its called ‘Planet Soarer’, from a previous ‘Soarer Diehard’, and can be found at http://planetsoarer.com/

Peter encouraged me to push on, towards the foot of the mountains, assuring me I was in for a big surprise. I didn’t want to disappoint him with my initial impressions and headed off for what I figured was going to be a waste of a couple of hours. Turn in to the first right hander and it sits flat goes around; nothing to it though at 30km/h. Peter urges more throttle. This time I add 20km/h to the signposted entry of the left/right flip flop and am mildly surprised when the tight controlled nature of the chassis has no problem with recovery and changing direction. Hmmm.

Pressing on, and starting to do things that would have me white knuckled in my own Soarer saw the Active completely unflapped. Never once did it give that feel of ‘catch me if you can’. Rather it replaced that insecure edge-of-a-slide feeling with a spooky sensation of being unable to ‘roll’. Didn’t matter how hard you punched the Active into the corner, or how stupidly late you apexed, there was no body roll. Not a little. No body roll at all.

My next mistake was driving the Active like a conventionally sprung car. All of a sudden the rules of braking are totally re written. Forget about a big stomp on the anchors unsettling the chassis and pitching the nose forward. Don’t worry about getting all your braking done in a straight line. This thing doesn’t dive. You can feel the suspension pushing back against you, but regardless of how contrived the braking experience feels the fact remains that other than change the traction limit of the front tyres you have done nothing to stop the car turning. If you have the grip then trail brake hard into every bend.

Its like that driving the Active. It creates a false dawn, makes you believe that the UZZ32, the heaviest of the Soarers, is actually the lightest, nimblest, and encourages you to constantly up the tempo. False or not though the fact that the Active can literally decimate the blacktop, make average drivers look brilliant, and focus the whole driving experience on the quality of the tyres, is nothing short of astounding. With around half the power of my highly tuned Soarer, the Active could, and would, easily gap it on challenging B roads. It’s a Soarer that handles, and it breaks all of my rules.

To achieve such massive stability, and almost zero roll, from a car weighing in at 1730kg is the result of massive engineering and development in a truly Active suspension system, of the same calibre as used in mid nineties Formula One. The Active Soarer has no springs, it has no shock absorbers, it has zero in the way of conventional suspension hardware. Instead it has massive hydraulic rams with computer controlled fluid bleed and height positioning on each corner that allow the chassis to be tweaked, balanced, and skewed, all at the bequest of a highly sophisticated electronic control system. Its this computer, or more to the point, the software contained within it that elevates the vehicles handling to such a transcendental plane. All of this in 1991.

As sophisticated as Nissans highly vaunted Atessa and Hicas systems? I would say the Toyota Active Suspension (TAS) system, and its associated components (A-4WS, A-SUS, ABS and TRC) place it well and truly on another plane of sophistication. You have to remember that where the Nissan four wheel drive system would look at the feedback from external sensors and them make decisions, the TAS would actually predict the type of surface and driving environment and make educated real time guesses as to the individual damping and wheel height rates. Scarily complicated, yet highly effective stuff.

The Active is also the only Soarer to be equipped with 4 wheel steering (that’s the A-4WS bit) and once more its controlled by a yaw sensor equipped independent management system that not only makes the blighter dive into corners, but also quite cleverly negates the effect of external disturbances to the vehicle. Caught in a massive crosswind requiring you make constant corrections? Not so if you are in an Active. You wouldn’t have a clue, just hold the wheel straight-ahead while the computer adjusts the wheel angles. The A-4WS also gives the Active the most delicious of steering feedback and general road feel. Very un-Soarer.

All of this whiz-bangery comes at a price though, and its unmistakeable when driving the Active that it’s a resource hungry system. It adds 90kg to the basic weight of the car, but more than that saps engine power from the piston driven hydraulic pump that sits on the front of the engine. Under initial engine acceleration when you need the grunt most there is drain from the pump to stop the rear end squatting. Active Soarers in both my and Peter Scotts book make a worthy candidate for a supercharger kit.

Reliability is right up there on these cars, with their biggest dilemma being wear to the O-ring seals in the hydraulic actuators. Much like the traditional Hispanic style hoppers it’s the seals that take the battering of constant extension and retraction. Unlike the aftermarket stuff the Toyota gear is still going strong after a decade. Peter is currently in the throes of installing some seals in his rear hydraulics, which is not a massive drama as all the parts are still readily available through specialist Toyota dealers.

Why then did Toyota only ever release this sophisticated A-SUS system in the domestic Japanese Soarer? Why haven’t they carried it on to other export Lexus models? Those are two questions we will probably never know the answer to, but you could bet your last buck that the balance sheet simply wasn’t working out, and the cars were simply too expensive to interest mainstream buyers. How expensive? How does 7.45 million yen – around $110 thousand Aussie big ones in 1991 sound? Like a lot, and sadly too much for most.

Good news for potential Active buyers though is that due to their lack of distinct external markings, and combined with a disinterested Japanese public, they can often be purchased for little more than a conventional Air Suspension model. In fact according to Peter Scott you can quite often luck onto an Active Lexus in Australia with the seller none the wiser. Compared to an Air Sus car? No Contest. Compared to any other luxury sports coupe we can think of? Active Soarer sets the standards.


Here is a pic of the suspension test:

O. L. T.

iTrader: (17)

thanks so much for the details. sometime when it isn't after 1 a.m. i will form a response.

Anthracite SC

I think the ideal set up would be a US spec SC300 w/ 2jz-gte Supra turbo converstion w/6spd manual adding the Soarer 4ws and Air suspension.

An impossibility?

Dimcorner

would be easier to get the JDM soarer and stick in the 2jz with tranny than to take the airbag suspension off...

Anthracite SC

Right...but..It would still be a right hand drive car....

Then doing a left hand car drive conversion I presume would be just as hard or harder than taking the air suspension off