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In the recent years, reduction of new product development time is the major challenge for all auto manufacturers to sustain in the stiff competition. Durability evaluation is one of the most time consuming element in New Product Development (NPD) process. Finding a generic solution for commonly faced design issues is a key factor for dramatic reduction in evaluation time. Testing time reduction can be achieved by breaking down the evaluation into subsystem level and component level instead of complete vehicle. But the maximum time reduction can be achieved only through durability evaluation at material / process level. This type of evaluation yields a generic solution, which results in establishing all-purpose design and material selection criteria during initial stage of development. By adopting this technique, separate evaluation of vehicles/ subsystems for improvements in material, welding, process etc. can be avoided.

Automotive manufacturers today are faced with the challenge of producing high quality products in a short time. In such a competitive environment, higher reliability gives competitive edge to the manufacturers. However, higher reliability involves increased durability testing on their part, which leads to an increase in development time and cost. Therefore, it becomes imperative to re-look the existing test standards as against the actual customer usage conditions thereby optimizing the testing time and the development costs. With that goal in mind, this paper elaborates the procedure used for establishing a correlation between three structural durability test rigs and customer usage on the road. Two different approaches were adopted to arrive at a final correlation between the structural test rigs and the customer usage on the road. The first approach arrives at a one to one correlation based on the failure modes of different components observed on each of the test rigs and in field.