What a lowering spring actually does
A lowering spring is shorter and usually stiffer than the factory one. It drops the car by a chassis-specific amount and raises the spring rate, which reduces body roll and dive. The factory dampers stay — and that's the catch. Dampers are valved for the factory spring; a stiffer, shorter spring asks more of them, and if they're already tired the car will feel worse, not better. On a car with healthy dampers, a quality spring like TEIN's S.TECH is a clean, sensible step.
What a coilover actually does
A coilover is a damper and spring designed as one unit, with a threaded body so ride height can be set, and — on the kits we fit — adjustable damping. Because the damper is valved for its own spring, the compromise that limits lowering springs goes away. Because height and damping are adjustable, the car can be set up for its use rather than living with one fixed answer. That's what you're paying for: not the parts, the ability to tune them.
Ride quality — the honest version
A good coilover set to a sensible height and damping rides as well as, or better than, a lowering spring on old factory dampers. A coilover slammed to the bump stops with the damping wound up rides terribly, and that's where the reputation comes from. Springs on fresh factory dampers ride well; springs on tired ones don't. In both cases the ride is decided by the setup and the state of the dampers, not by which box the parts came in.
The most common mistake with both: fitting them and skipping the setup and the alignment. Lowering changes the geometry. Always.
So which one
Daily driver, healthy factory dampers, you want it to sit lower and feel tighter: springs. That's the Super Street package. Fast road, occasional track day, you want to tune ride height and damping to the car: twin-tube coilovers — the Sport package. Track-focused or seriously driven, and TEIN make a Mono Racing application for the car: monotube coilovers, Super Sport. If the factory dampers are tired and you were going to replace them anyway, coilovers start to make financial sense a tier earlier.
Either way, the setup is the product
Ride height per corner, shock length so the damper works in the right part of its stroke, a damping baseline for the use, then an alignment. A coilover kit installed at whatever height it came out of the box is most of the money for little of the result. Wheel alignment is arranged through a trusted provider near our Brendale workshop — we don't run alignment equipment in-house.
