Customer‐Oriented Evaluation of Vehicle Handling Characteristics

The handling quality of newly developed vehicles has reached a high standard for most car manufacturers. Nevertheless, many vehicle brands attempt to stand out based on the “handling character” of their vehicles. For this purpose, it is crucial to focus development efforts on technological advancements that clearly improve this handling character as perceived by the customer. This requires the possibility to predict customer evaluations of vehicle handling characteristics, preferably in all phases of vehicle development. The classical method for customer-oriented handling evaluations are subjective evaluations, where vehicles are evaluated by selected customer groups or trained test drivers. Considering various rules regarding the execution and data analysis, this method can generate valuable results. However, the reproducibility and significance of subjective evaluations is limited because of several (human) factors, whereas the necessary effort remains high. Furthermore, the necessity for costly prototype vehicles conflicts with the increasingly virtual vehicle development process. These problems have led to various approaches to support or even replace subjective evaluations by objective results from measurements or simulations. This chapter provides an overview on methods of both subjective and objective evaluations and gives practical advice. Keywords: vehicle handling; customer orientation; subjective evaluation; objective evaluation; correlation