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The automotive trends of vehicles with lower aerodynamic drag and more powerful drivetrains have caused increasing concern regarding stability issues at high speeds, since more streamlined bodies show greater sensitivity to crosswinds. This is especially pronounced for high vehicles, such as sports utility vehicles. Besides, the competitiveness in the automotive industry requires faster development times and, thus, a need to evaluate the high speed stability performance in an early design phase, preferable using simulation tools. The usefulness of these simulation tools partly relies on realistic boundary conditions for the wind and quantitative measures for assessing stability without the subjective evaluation of experienced drivers. This study employs an on-road experimental measurements setup to define relevant wind conditions and to find an objective methodology to evaluate high speed stability.

The various factors that affect ride comfort, including noise, vibrations and harshness (NVH) have been in focus in many research studies due to an increasing demand in ride comfort in the automotive industry. Vibrations have been highlighted as an important contribution to assess and predict overall ride comfort. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to explain ride comfort with respect to vibration for the seated occupant based on a systematic literature review of previous fundamental research and to relate these results to the application in the contemporary automotive industry. The results from the literature study show that numerous research studies have determined how vibration frequency, magnitude, direction, duration affect human response to vibration. Also, the studies have highlighted how body posture, age, gender and anthropometry affect the human perception of comfort.