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Handling behaviour is a very important aspect of modern cars, which need to reach high levels of lateral acceleration maintaining good stability and driveability. The presence of an AWD powertrain changes the response of the vehicle and then it is very important to qualify the car behavior in terms of perceived performances through objective indexes. The paper presents the development of evaluation criteria for AWD vehicles objective assessment; simulation tools and SW standard procedure has been optimised for AWD performances virtual evaluation and different architectures (locking, self-locking, visco-coupling, active differentials) are compared in terms of longitudinal, lateral and cross-coupling dynamics performances. Through the proposed methods it is possible to make vehicle system analysis using simulation model and standard procedures to classify different AWD architectures.

Centro Ricerche Fiat in collaboration with Fiat Auto vehicle test department has developed a numerical-experimental procedure in order to support on-road development and fine tuning of a new car with electric power steering. The integration of an electric power steering model, given by the supplier, in a full vehicle model, in order to evaluate steering feel objective quality indices, has allowed to improve vehicle performance in term of steering feel and reduce on-road development time.