I understand struts to be long planks of steel that were not used on my car. As far as I know, my car (the wrecked SD) uses Bilstein shock absorbers and metal coil springs.

Now does the term "struts" have a generic usage that may refer to (up/down) shock absorbers and springs.

Based on my non perfunctory observations over the years, struts were never used on MBZ past at least 1977...I have always seen shocks/springs.

I know this is a potentially silly topic but I wanna clear this up. Thx.