You’re very welcome, my friend. I’m a natural pedant. 
Re: the 710/780, I suspect that the 780 controls the hub in the longitudinal axis and the 710 and 730 in the lateral axis. That would make them perpendicular to one another.
But, than, you’ve got the car there, and there’s no better reference than the actual car!
To confuse things a little more, I think the new Mustang has a strut and two lower ball joints at each front corner.(Maybe @Mustangman or @FoDaddy can confirm.)
;-]
It does indeed have front struts…
And it does indeed have two front ball joints…
By having 2 front ball joints it creates a virtual steering pivot that is out past where you could actually put a ball joint. This puts the axis where the tire pivots right at the middle of the tire to a little outboard giving a very small scrub radius. It also allows you to put great big tires on the car!
There are Audis that have FOUR ball joints in each front suspension side. 2 uppers and 2 lowers with a coil-over shock as well as the tie rod ends. Virtual upper and lower pivot points.
Yes, I looked under the car this morning, and that’s exactly how it is configured. Two parallel bushed rods 710 & 730 run from opposing sides of the hub laterally to a connection near the center-line of the car. And another bushed rod runs from the hub connecting at a point a 18 inches or so toward the front of the car. Those rods define a roughly horizontal plane surface, and the strut’s job (besides its shock absorbing function) must be to keep that plane at precisely the correct angle w/respect to the horizontal.
Those rods perform a control arm function, but I wonder, would mechanics call them control arms?
From what I’m learning here, the difference between a “strut” and something that looks like a strut is that the strut, in add’n to its shock and spring function, alos performs a control-arm like function; i.e a strut is partially responsible for controlling the hub’s geometrical orientation, while a “non-strut” provides only the supporting spring and shock absorbing function. A strut must be configured sort of like if you could slip a 1/2 inch iron pipe inside a 3/4 inch iron pipe so the inside pipe just has enough room to fit into the outside pipe, but no more. That would provide something similar to a one piece solid pipe with a slip joint in the vertical direction, sort of like a two piece splined drive shaft.
So now I’m wondering, since it is established my Corolla has struts both front and rear, would you say both the front and rear are McPherson struts? I’m still not clear on the difference between a generic “strut” and a McPherson strut I guess.
Your car most definitely has McPherson strut
Another kind is modified McPherson strut, as per Benz cars from the 1980s and 1990s
Not all struts are coil-over
Some shocks are coil-over
I believe mountainbike has been doing an excellent job explaining everything 
So my Corolla has McPherson struts both front and rear?
YES
Can’t you see in the picture that the coil springs are NEXT to the strut, as opposed to your car, which has coil-over struts front and rear . . . ?
Your question has been answered, I believe 
A McPherson strut and strut are exactly the same thing. Strut is just short-hand. And Yes, the strut acts as the upper control arm AND the shock absorber in one part. As a buddy used to say, a strut is a telescopic structural device. It takes cornering loads, it takes braking loads. That’s why the piston (the shiny thing poking out the top) on a strut is 22, 25 or even 28 mm in diameter and a shock is 12 or 16mm.
There are monotube struts which are more like motorcycle struts that are actually upside down shocks inside and structural tube holding the spring seat and the chrome plated part you see is a tube with the shock inside it and they are 40mm or so in diameter.
Yes it does. Struts front and rear.
Ab-so-lutely correct. Older Mustangs 79 to 2004 and older Camaros and Firebirds (82-91) had this layout as well.
NOT as preferred as the coil spring over strut. The spring can be tilted to offset the bending forces the weight of the car applies to the strut itself. Help reduce friction and make a better ride. That layout doesn’t allow that.
Ok, I think I’m finally grasping the concept. I was thinking incorrectly that even if a car is equipped w/struts front and rear, only the front wheel would host a McPherson strut, b/c the front wheel strut has to accommodate the steering function too, so it would be designed a little differently than the rear wheel which isn’t steered. But now I understand a strut is a strut.
Yes, I can see that the Benz strut apparently doesn’t have the spring function, but it still has what I call the pipe inside pipe control arm strut function.
And the first independent front suspension used a pillar sliding up and down on a long king pin
just to keep things interesting
Yeah, probably. Depends on who you talk to I suppose.
To me it’s more important to let the nomenclature follow the function, rather than having the function follow the nomenclature. A part can, and often is, called by more than one name, especially since foreign cars have become ubiquitous, but the important thing is what it does. That transcends language differences.
In NH they’re a roof and a hood; in England they’re a hood and a boot. The parts and what they do are exactly the same. Only the names are changed.
That pillar idea seems to work pretty well. It is indeed a strut like arrangement, provided the nomenclature will allow a strut to perform only the pipe-within-a-pipe structural function without the damping or spring function. Your vdo inspired me to get under a rear corner of my car while a helper pushed on that corner while I watched the whole works in action. It really does seem to do a good job of keeping the wheel plane in alignment while allowing the necessary motion to occur otherwise. The Corolla’s rear suspension seems a little on the flimsy side just looking at it. I don’t think it would work if the rear wheels were powered. The twisting force on the hub would quickly t urn the rear control rods into pretzels. But it works ok for tag along rear wheels.
Edit: You’d think braking would result in a similar twisting force on the hub. So maybe that “hub sort of floats in mid-air” arrangement would work even for rear wheel drive.
