The semi-active suspension system is getting widely adopted in passenger vehicles for its ability to improve ride comfort over the passive suspension system while not degrading driving safety. A key to the success is to develop practical controllers that yield performance enhancement over the passive damper under various driving conditions. To this end, several control strategies have been studied and evaluated in this research in consideration of practical aspects such as nonlinearity and dynamics of the damper. From simulation results. it has been observed that, with the proposed control schemes, ride comfort can be significantly upgraded while suppressing degradation of driving safety.