I work at a Toyota dealership and every so often I am seeing our Corolla, Matrix, and some other vehicles have a sort of half strut brace on them. It looks like the mounting bracket for a strut bar but it doesn't have a bar over the tops.

My question is whether or not this serves any useful purpose or is this just a sort of thing they added as an extra piece?

Here's a picture of a Matrix Engine Bay, you can see what I am talking about, they are the black U-shaped plates ontop of the strut towers.

 

From a cost standpoint they would only use them if they serve a purpose.

I would say the purpose is to help support the upper strut mounts. Since the majority of force is seen pushing up. That extra plate serves as a "doubler" to the thickness of material in that area.

-billy

 

I think Billy is correct. My '03 Protege had those on the strut towers, when I installed the factory strut bar they were removed.

 

Hmm... Maybe I'll make a couple for my car and test them out when its running.

 

I'm with Billy on this one. Since the strut towers are so close to the firewall cowl, adding a strut tower brace to this particular model makes little to no sense.

 

Correct. They are there to keep the strut towers from Mushrooming. Modern cars are having issues with mushrooming due to the huge reduction in chassis flex because the towers are so close to the fire wall. That's the biggest complaint from Mini owners. About 90% of them have musroomed at least one shock tower. The chassis is very stiff, and the strut towers are braced by the fire wall something has to give. It has been the strut towers on a lot of newer cars. Those are a last ditched cheap attempt to add bracing at the top of the towers to make them less likely to mushroom upwards without having to redesign or retool anything.

This will offer no benifit to our cars since we donot have mushrooming issues. The give we get is in the chassis it self, and the fix is a good strut tower bar.