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Recently Piaggio developed a new scooter equipped with a revolutionary front suspension electronically controlled locking. It was critical to test and validate the design of this new control system before deployment to ensure high customer satisfaction and reducing warranty costs. Test on a HIL platform accelerates the verification and validation process. A validated HIL set-up, being a repeatable and reliable test platform with a short turnaround time is ideal for developing standardized processes for Electronic Control Unit (ECU) testing and calibration. With shortening life cycles in the motorcycle industry, HIL technology is rapidly gaining acceptance not only in conventional vehicle programs, but also challenging vehicle programs. The development of control strategies for MP3 ECU has benefited from HIL-based testing. It has proven to be an efficient tool for software strategy development, implementation and validation.

The new European Legislation requires new strategies in order to achieve a reliable emission diagnostic over the entire life of the vehicle (EOBD). For the validation and the fine-tuning of the new diagnostic controls, the car manufacturers must manage fleets of vehicles in order to evaluate the behavior of these diagnostics over a real aging cycle. This paper describes a useful tool that has been developed to check the most important diagnostic indexes behavior with aging, that help us in the management of a durability fleet. The system is composed of: a specific hardware added to the Engine Control Unit (ECU) a real time software for the automatic storage of the most important diagnostic parameters an off line software for data analysis. During the use of durability car the system runs automatically and does not require any additional operation to the driver (“black-box system”), and no additional skilled people is required for the data acquisition.