Stabiliser Bar

Sway bars are an important component of a vehicle’s suspension. Also known as anti-roll, anti-sway, stabilizer, or roll bars, a sway bar reduces your vehicle’s body roll and “sway”. Not every vehicle has a sway bar, but they can be extremely useful, especially for larger vehicles like RVs and motor coaches.

To give you a better understanding, we’ll go through what a sway bar is, what it does, and how to determine if you need a replacement. Let’s dive in!

What is a Sway Bar?

A sway bar is part of your vehicle’s suspension, which includes your wheels / tires, springs, shocks, steering system, linkages, bushings, and joints. Sway bars help your ride handle turns and prevent body lean, the last thing you want while operating a motor coach or RV!

At its core, a sway bar is really just a torsion spring—a piece of metal that reacts to a twisting movement. When your vehicle turns, the sway bar works to level everything out and fights that tilting feeling you may have experienced when taking a corner too fast.

The number and variety of sway bars depends on the vehicle, and the actual bar attaches across the vehicle’s body from one wheel to the other.

What does a sway bar do?

As mentioned above, the purpose of a sway bar is to prevent body lean in the vehicle, typically caused by turning. When a vehicle—especially a large vehicle like a truck or motor coach—turns, force is distributed to the outside (if you were turning right, force and weight would be naturally shifted to the left.) This typically causes the outside tire to lift higher than the inside tire. But, with a sway bar, tires are brought back to the same level, thus leveling the entire vehicle.

As a torsion spring, the sway bar reacts to the twisting movement (again, most commonly experienced in turns) and levels your vehicle’s wheels. On the flip side, if both tires hit something at the same force, there would be no need for a sway bar because there would be no twisting motion.

The most obvious reason why sway bars are important is to ensure your vehicle doesn’t roll too much when handling turns. Aside from safety, sway bars help prevent lopsided wheel alignment and work to maintain an overall better grip on the road.