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Underbody vehicle flows are poorly understood given the comparatively small field of research to draw upon; even more so in the case of crosswinds. With the advent of electric and hybrid electric vehicles and their increased cooling demands, there is a need for a link between the aerodynamic flow field and the thermodynamic response. Thus underbody research considering a yawing vehicle was conducted on a Chevrolet Aveo5 hatchback. The vehicle was outfitted with a heat source to provide a baseline analysis along thermocouples, pressure probes and flow visualization tufts. The climatic wind tunnel at the University Of Ontario Institute Of Technology's Automotive Centre of Excellence provided video data of the tufts and thermal imaging data of the heat source.

The University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) is the home of the General Motors of Canada Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE), a university owned and operated facility that is funded by the university and the provincial and federal governments of Canada. As such, ACE is available to all automotive manufacturers (OEM's), Tier 1 suppliers, university researchers, or any other industry requiring the need for independent research and development test capability. A large climatic wind tunnel is the signature feature of ACE, which also includes climatic chambers (one of which is a high feature chamber), a climatic 4-post shaker test cell and a hemi-anechoic chamber equipped with a multi-axis shaker table. Some key design features of the climatic wind tunnel include a variable nozzle geometry (from 7 m₂ to 13 m₂), a chassis dynamometer inserted in an 11.7 meter turntable, a boundary layer control system and circuit acoustic treatment for low background noise levels.