its like they took the 3rd gen suspension and massaged it a little bit.

depending on the dimensions... we MAY have a different spindle option >.>

 

Wow not any different than my solara or camry

 

Porsche has used a similar arrangement on many of their models, not sure if that is still the case now.

It is a good design, problem is that you really need to have the spring on the strut to optimize it - something GM did not do.

 

we make due though. my real surprise is how close the steering and shock mounts themselves really are.

what other spindles/knuckles are this close?

 

While this is a MacPherson strut, it is a bit different than what is on our thirdgens. At the bottom you see two independent control arms and two ball joints. This creates a virtual pivot that is outboard of the ball joints. By adjusting the angle of those arms relative to each other you can pretty much create any scrub radius you like. It's a pretty ingenious arrangement and I've looked into doing it on a thirdgen. More on that later.

The 5th gen Camaro uses the same style of suspension, as does the Pontiac G8, the E92 bmw (to include the M3), the E39 BMW (M5), that's just off the top of my head, there are quite a few more. I believe the original dual ball joint design came out of Mercedes in the 70s. It's just a variation on the MacPherson.

Porsche may use it in one of their models but not on the 911, up through the 991 series they just use a single ball joint lower.

The Macpherson strut was actually designed in the 1940s at GM.
Everything with suspension involves tradeoffs, the location of the spring is not that big of a deal. Porsche actually used torsion bars on MacPherson up until 1989. The disadvantage to having the spring on the control arm is weight since you now have a heavier spring, and have to design a control arm that will resist much greater bending loads. The tradeoff is that when you are locked into having it on the strut, you now sacrifice packaging freedom. If GM were to have designed the thirdgen with a coil over, either the strut tower would have to be much larger and possibly taller, or the wheel width would have to be narrower, or both. They would also have to trade weight loss down low with a smaller weight gain up high by reinforcing the strut towers (and making them larger). Which comes back to that dual ball joint setup, it just doesn't package well in our wheel wells and is ultimately not necessary, you can have a stock scrub radius with 315s if you know what you are doing

The other thing that the coil over helps with is resisting the bending moment on the strut. The only thing keeping your wheel flopping over inboard is that strut so the side loads on that shaft can be pretty large. This creates friction. Having the spring on the strut allows you to offset the spring on the strut shaft which counter acts this bending. You can see this on just about any factory coil over car and you can also see this in the picture above where it looks like they've used a custom wound spring to accomplish this.
IMHO the location of the spring is not really a big deal by itself. To realize any gains it has to be done as part of a total package. I don't think the thirdgen is hampered much at all due to the location of the spring.
If you want to see some interesting stuff, plot some different attributes from the suspension of the latest Porsches to our cars. It's helpful to see what some of the best are doing. One thing of note is that their steering systems are designed to allow a heck of a lot more caster and the factory specs are more than what you can even achieve on a thirdgen. There is a good reason for this.