There could be no one more surprised than myself when at the First World Microcar meet in the Chicago area in the summer of 2010, I finally got to meet the engineer who created and produced these cars. That surprise was due to the fact that after a year and a half of obsessive analysis, and probably 20 different creative fixes- I found the Freeways founder to be genuinely unaware of the faults he had engineered into the car.
I had to build a full scale wood and metal mock up of the suspension and steering controls, but leaving out shocks and springs, to finally be able to clearly witness just exactly what was going wrong with various parameters of wheel alignment during different amounts of suspension compression and extension.
There was also a considerable amount of monkey motion due to overly generous design tolerances, and use of short cuts with inherent drawbacks as well as inadequate quality of parts chosen.
The marvelous and gratifying aspect of all this involvement, is that I eventually got it all right, whilst not betraying any hint of my vast changes made from a casual visual inspection- except for the wheels and tires.
I actually got a single lower trailing arm front suspension to produce no more than 12 thousandth of an inch of toe in with one inch of wheel travel, whereas the original set up was all over the place ( literally and figuratively), and averaged out at 248 thousandths of an inch of bump steer with one inch of wheel travel, but actually performed quite differently on right and left sides due to different steering rod lengths as necessitated by the central seating and necessarily off center input point provided by the ball and trunion steering mechanism.
I could write a book on it, but there would be far too few readers to justify the effort and expense.