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During the past few years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) Vehicle Research and Test Center has generated a plethora of reliable vehicle test data during their efforts to study vehicle rollover propensity. This paper provides further analyses of a small selection of some of the data. The analyses provided here derive in part from the previous work, trying to answer some of the questions spawned by earlier analyses. The purpose of this paper is to introduce several new concepts to the study of vehicle roll stability and provide case studies using the results available from the NHTSA testing. Results from several severe maneuvers are studied in detail to gain understanding of vehicle response in these cases.

This paper is primarily a printed listing of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Light Vehicle Inertial Parameter Database. This database contains measured vehicle inertial parameters from SAE Paper 930897, “Measured Vehicle Inertial Parameters -NHTSA’s Data Through September 1992” (1), as well as parameters obtained by NHTSA since 1992. The proceeding paper contained 414 entries. This paper contains 82 new entries, for a total of 496. The majority of the entries contain complete vehicle inertial parameters, some of the entries contain tilt table results only, and some entries contain both inertia and tilt table results. This paper provides a brief discussion of the accuracy of inertial measurements. Also included are selected graphs of quantities listed in the database for some of the 1998 model year vehicles tested.

This paper presents a real-time steering system torque feedback model used in the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS). The vehicle model is based on real-time recursive multi-body dynamics augmented with vehicle subsystems models including tires, power train, brakes, aerodynamics and steering. The steering system feel is of paramount importance for the fidelity of the simulator. The driver has to feel the appropriate torque as he/she steers the vehicle. This paper presents a detailed mathematical model of the steering physics from low-speed stick-slip to high-speed states. On-center steering weave handling and aggressive lane change inputs are used to validate the basic mathematical predictions. This validation is objective and open loop, and was done using field experiments.