These Chassis Technologies Will Quiet, Smooth, and Reinvent Future Cars
Written by admin on January 13, 2026
These Chassis Technologies Will Quiet, Smooth, and Reinvent Future Cars
The latest in automotive technology, including an EV skateboard for boutique cars, active noise-canceling dampers, and intelligent motion management.
While CES 2026 is still largely about broader electronic innovations, some of the electrons get focused on technology car lovers will feel in the way their vehicles drive. On the Donut Lab stand, alongside the solid-state batteries and torque-dense Donut Motors, was a fully developed Watt PACES modular, lightweight skateboard chassis using both that aims to hasten development of new EVs. Nearby were shocks capable of canceling noise and AI-powered chassis-control systems promising to reduce motion sickness.
Watt PACES Chassis
U.K.-based Watt Electric Vehicle Company has spent five years developing this modular, scalable Passenger and Commercial Electric Skateboard (PACES) to simplify the task of developing an electric vehicle—be that a sexy boutique roadster of the type Britain is famous for or a workaday last-mile delivery vehicle—that promise to keep neighborhoods quieter and cleaner.
The bonded aluminum architecture features thin-wall extrusions of the company’s own design, which makes it easy to scale the length and width of the platform while keeping weight down. Specifying a high degree of recycled material further reduces the carbon footprint, and the parts are designed to be partially self-jigging to simplify assembly and enhance dimensional accuracy.
Choosing from Donut Lab’s 12- and 17-inch in-wheel motors allows power and torque outputs ranging from 10 to 802 hp and 118 to 3,540 lb-ft with, front-, rear-, or all-wheel drive drawing power from Donut Lab’s portfolio of battery types and chemistries (including the recently released solid-state design). This architecture includes the full electrical and charging platforms as well.
The unit on display featured a simple passive control arm steel suspension, but the architecture can support adaptive damping, air, and other concepts. And body-mount provisions are also anticipated. CEO Neil Yates asserts that with PACES, companies can realistically expect to progress from a design drawing to road-legal prototypes in six months.
ZF AI Road Sense
Lots of presenters at CES 2026 repeated the refrain that the promise of the software-defined vehicle is only starting to be fulfilled as electrical architectures upgrade to bring true AI compute power to cars.
Prepping for this coming wave is ZF’s Chassis 2.0 Strategy, which includes AI Road Sense to fuse all the chassis-sensing data in its cubiX. Then, it coordinates a control strategy it executes by sending signals out to the myriad actuators around the chassis, such as the passive Continuous Damping Control shocks (as on the Cadillac Optiq) or the sMOTION active damping (as deployed in the Porsche Panamera and Taycan Active Ride systems).
The system is scalable, with the Standard version tapping into CAN bus signals to identify current road type. The Advanced version adds camera data for predictive surface detection and analysis, while Premium expands the system with lidar scanning the road surface 80 feet ahead with an accuracy of less than an inch. The idea is to continually assess the road’s grip level and self-selecting whatever drive mode is most appropriate.
