Re: 06\' Coupe... on air bags
Vic, I have no direct experience with air suspensions, but to answer your questions generically, air suspension is progressive, and the amount of progression is directly related to the accumulator size. For example, if the accumulator was quite small, the rate of progression would be quite high. By applying Boyles law, you will see that if you compress the volume to one half it's original size, the pressure will double, 1/10 the volume = 10 X the pressure. If the accumulator is large fully compressing the strut won't cause as much pressure increase as if it was small. Imagine a pressure tank, partially filled with air & partially with liquid. If you increase the fluid volume the amount left for air is decreased, thus varying the rate of progression, whereas varying the starting air pressure would set the initial spring rate. By this way a suspension system would by highly tuneable.
As far as the complexity - yes of course it's much more complex than simple springs and therefore susectible to failure. This becomes more pronounced when considering the limited amount of engineering and testing resources that could be applied to a one-off design such as the one depicted above.
Regards,
Mike Dolan