@CPDave has it right, KYB's are hot garbage.
I've run Monroe's, I've run KYB's, I've run RCD Bilsteins and I've run the Hotchkis Fox's on one or another of my Mopars. The KYB's are the the worst of the lot, you can't make a legitimate comparison on performance or ride quality to the Bilstein or Hotchkis shocks. I ran KYB's on my Challenger for quite a while, tens of thousands of miles with 1.12" torsion bars. When I took the KYB's off my Challenger and replaced them with the Bilsteins it was like I completely changed the entire suspension- it was a night and day, massive improvement in both ride quality AND handling. On my Duster I ran the Monroe Classics a PO had put on there and ran 1" torsion bars for a bit before I upgraded to 1.12's and Hotchkis Fox's. The Monroe's weren't great by any means, they were too soft but they kept the suspension from oscillating so they did their job. They could have been a decade old too. If cheap is the only thing that matters I'd run them or Gabriels a thousand times before I looked at KYB's.
I have no idea why there's this fascination with the KYB's unless it's just marketing because they run ads in all the car magazines. They're
horrific on torsion bars with larger than 1", the digressive valving will rattle your eyeballs loose in their sockets over minor bumps and mildly rough roads. And then they completely give up when there's any kind of actual suspension travel and the bars just dominate, there's no control at all from the KYB's with any significant travel with larger bars.
Even on factory sized bars they're too stiff with minor inputs and absent with larger movements. The "stiff off the mark" masks the too soft wheel rate at first, but when things actually move they quit. So you get what seems like a "band aid" for the soft torsion bars with regard to ride, but in reality they've made your handling worse.
), and I have to admit that it rides pretty nice.
