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Vehicle dynamics CAE capabilities has increased in the past few years, specially, for handling and steering attributes. However, secondary ride simulations are still highly depended on the tire model. Such tire model must be capable to simulate high order phenomenon such as impact and harshness transmissibility in three directions. In order to gather tire information sufficient to cope with these phenomena, one needs to perform a series of specific tests, and so be able to build the intended tire model. Still, there could be correlation issues. This whole process takes a lot of time and resources. This article presents a semi-analytical approach, using data gathered via wheel force transducers (WFTs) that are typically used for load cascading and durability purposes. The method main advantage is that since it relies on measured data at the wheel center, it is independent of a tire model, and, as such, it demands less time and resources.

Ride comfort has been always a critical point in the development of a vehicle. In the recent years, has become an increasingly important factor in the vehicle design. Only subjective evaluation of ride comfort is no longer an acceptable or competitive way to assess the driver and passenger experience. And sometimes metrics extracted from measurements are often not correlated with subjective evaluation and with customers feed-back due to difficulties on the process of ride evaluation. Those difficulties are largely due to variations on the tracks where the vehicle is evaluated, on the speed of the vehicle passing through the tracks, etc. In other words, sometimes it is hard to have a process with a good repeatability. This work suggests a method of ride measurement which improves the repeatability and also creates a possibility to generate tracks for evaluation of specific ride problems.

The driver judges his vehicle based on subjective aspects. Vehicle dynamics characteristics including ride and handling have a major impact on this evaluation. For this reason, vehicle manufactures have grown investments in order to improve vehicle dynamics behavior. Subjective evaluation and customer satisfaction research show which dynamic characteristics need to be improved. CAE models, after being validated based on experimental measures, give a good insight on vehicle dynamic behavior and guide change proposals. At end, new subjective evaluations and measures are carried out in order to check the real improvement of CAE proposals. This work shows the use of the described methodology for a pickup vehicle dynamics evaluation. One of the major complains of pickup drives is related to ride quality. Thinking of that feature the evaluation process considers several phenomena, such as abruptness, front topping, front bottoming, head toss and rear aftershake.