Point taken, Riff Raff, but $2k for OEM shocks?!?!? I might spend that kind of money for stock shocks on my 928, but that car is - like your Cougar - a "collector" car. The VX is the one and only daily driver for most of us, and needs to be kept running for a reasonable price. And because of Isuzu's abandonment of the US market, any running VX will sooner or later turn into a Franken-VX, half-filled with aftermarket and custom-fabricated parts.

Our man killinformula is not trying to improve on the VX's engineering - he may just have to replace some defective shocks, and the Bils offer pretty much the same ride as the OEM shocks for an eighth of the price . I know they are the same because I compared my Bilstein ride directly to a stock VX's ride, and it is so close that I'd bet not one of us would know if we were riding on Bilstiens unless we were told.

Otherwise, I 100% share your perspective that a lay owner is seldom going to out-engineer a team of professionals. I wish I were smart enough to have figured that one out just using common sense, but it took many, many modification projects on various cars I've owned over the years to learn the lesson - most of the time, you make an improvement in one area, but you pay for it with something that got worse because of your mod.

In the VX's case, the special remote-reservoir OEM shocks are not the only shock in the world that could possibly afford the VX good ride quality in everyday driving. There are lots of off-the-shelf shocks that could have worked. But let's face it - they went with the gimmicky shocks for marketing purposes - to give the VX some high-tech off-road cred.

The other thing to consider is that the fancy-pants OEM shocks are, well, built kind of crappy. It seems like a third of the people here have had one or more OEM shocks go bad well before 75k miles, and some in the first 20k miles. That's a pretty bad failure rate. I would question the wisdom of replacing a ridiculously expensive and prone-to-failure OEM shock with another, when you can get warrantied-for-life Bilsteins for a fraction of the price.