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In India, three wheelers are the major mode of the public transport used by common people. The competition in the market necessitates to develop a vehicle for maximum customer satisfaction. One of the important attribute of vehicle is passenger ride comfort. In the past, majority of the work on the ride comfort study has been carried out on passenger vehicles, which are mostly owner driven, but no detailed study has been carried out on quantification of driver as well as passenger ride comfort for a three-wheeler. In the present exercise, major emphasis has been given to ride comfort of the passenger and to characterize them with different makes of three wheelers. There are number of algorithms available to quantitatively measure the performance of ride comfort. The most popular one is ISO 2631. These standards are primarily developed based on response of human organs to different frequency range.

The duration for the development of a new vehicle model is continuously decreasing. This does not permit adequate time for proving component assemblies and vehicles to be evaluated for durability by conventional measures. However, increasing competition and quality consciousness calls for an assured life with a high degree of confidence. This has forced the test engineers to look for techniques for accelerating the durability evaluation. The technique calls for concepts for compressing the evaluation time. This can be achieved by compression in both time as well as frequency domain. Further, it also calls for correct techniques for the mixing of roads, extrapolation of data acquired over a small distance to the vehicle life, evaluation and elimination of non or less damaging inputs, etc. This paper reviews some of the existing techniques and describes case studies of how accelerated testing can be applied in vehicle development.

Road surface, payload and speed of the vehicle are important parameters, which affect the life of a vehicle. This paper discusses the relationship between road/load/speed and damage to the vehicle as a whole and automotive structure in particular. This will help the designer to understand non-linear relationship between different service conditions and damage and to arrive at realistic input spindle loads for design considerations. This will also help the evaluation engineer in the development of durability cycle by correlating different environmental conditions with actual service conditions.

The Indian automotive industry today stands as the most vibrant, modern and upbeat automobile market in the world and is the current focus of venture for almost every leading vehicle manufacturer in the world. New variants launched in Indian market are tested by instrumenting it with different sensors and running it on proving ground and public roads and further validated in the laboratory. These testing practices may be derived from the market needs and driving pattern of that region and trying to adopt for Indian condition. The driving characteristics obtained from other markets may not represent Indian driving patterns. Similarly Indian vehicle manufacturer also need to know updated driving characteristics, which is very much dynamic and changing with new type of roads/driving habit etc. There is a need to tune the vehicle for realistic Indian conditions and driving pattern.