This is my assessment of the Arnott coil-over conversion, after one month of use on a 2004 VDP with aprox 110000 kms. Let me preface this by saying that the car had no air suspension issues, other than "air suspension fault" one time after being left out all night at minus 25;cleared by itself five minutes after starting. The reason for the change - I just felt the original air bags, shocks, sensors and compressor had about reached their service limit for reliability. Installation was fairly straight forward - took me about eight hours, but four hours of that was trying to get the rear seat out, as the seat back retaining catch has been assembled wrongly, (at the factory?), so that the pull release mechanism didn't work. Won't go into detail, but without that pull release you have a real problem! I was one of those unfortunate people who got the defective front shocks, but one call to Arnott, and a return call from the Boss himself, got new shocks at my front door within 24 hours; not bad when you consider Florida to Calgary, (Canada), and through customs in that time frame. I was very impressed with the service from Arnott. Took me an hour and a half to replace the front shocks.
Contrary to what some members experienced, I felt the coilovers gave a slightly firmer ride, but then maybe my original shocks were a little tired. The car no longer has that "floaty" feeling at speed, no longer bottoms out over the speed bumps and generally feels a lot more planted, though possibly a little noisier due to sound transmitted through the springs - that may be in my head as I'm running winter tires.All in all I feel it was a real upgrade, and the peace of mind alone was worth it..

 

All that money spent when it could have just been a worn-out compressor !

 

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I did say my air suspension had no issues. I decided to do this for reliability rather than having issues, possibly many miles from home. The car is eight years old and I feel that's about the limit for reliability on this system; many members have problems long before this, just look at the percentage of suspension related issues on this forum. The whole conversion, including shipping was less than the price of one oem air shock in Calgary. As a point of interest, a compressor around here is approaching half the cost of what I paid for the whole conversion.