GlenH

Thanks cheshire cat. I read about the rear ARB which sounds interesting. Shame it has to be done with the wheels on the ground - no inspection pit / ramps so I can't do it myself.

'Gas pressure' just means the oil is under pressure to reduce foaming (which leads to inconsistent characteristics). Pretty much all shocks use oil to damp the movement, and all good ones have the oil under pressure.

Springs are definitely fine. The car has Bridgestone ER300s at standard pressure on at the moment, but I don't know if they have a particularly stiff sidewall or not.

2010 elegance estate - the car is quite uncomfortable on anything but very smooth roads (although it's better at speed, much worse when going slow), and is probably best described as very jiggly. My wife's mk6 golf is much more comfortable and less jiggly. It feels like it's the rear that is at fault, and when I go over speed bumps the driver side rear particularly feels like it's rock hard (the car seems to dip and rebound when coming off the speed bump on the front and rear left, but not rear right). The car has only done about 28k miles - is it possible for something to have seized up in this time (i.e. bushings)? I've replaced the right rear shock absorber in case that was stuck/seized/dodgy, but it's not made any difference. Is this a common problem?

I suspect the reason that speed/revs don't seem to change between the two gears is that at very low speeds, the 'box will be slipping the clutch. Put it in manual mode and you see the difference.