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| Future trends in vehicle dynamics | |
June 2008 |
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| Nissan Nobuya Hato, advanced vehicle dynamics director "Nissan's ride and handling gives a high quality feel when pulling away, is smooth over rough roads, feels secure at high speed, and uses good steering response and braking characteristics to give a feeling of the car and driver as one.
"We’re developing this by quantifying human feelings. We’ve created a typical European road at our Hokkaido proving ground and are performing tests to identify the vehicle characteristics most relevant to human feelings. "After the quantification process, we break the vehicle characteristics down into the component characteristics and set targets for each. We then investigate the targets using CAE to minimise the cost of physical confirmation. Body motion control is a key technology for providing a secure feeling at high speeds. We break it down to coil spring and damper characteristics. "We’re working hard at using CAE to select the right materials and precisely plan our vehicles’ mass-distribution. We’re also optimising our link geometries to balance handling, ride comfort and NVH. We’re also developing and adopting nodal body mounts. "In the next few years chassis control technologies will be key. As bodies become more rigid, integrating control of four-wheel active-steer systems and ESC will increase suspension systems’ capacity will be important. "We think steer and brake by-wire will improve safety and convenience. Nissan has already commercialised several brake-actuated safety features, such as Lane Departure Prevention and Distance Control Assist. X-by-wire will give us more freedom to control vehicle dynamics and driver-feel. "Suspension control linked to intelligent transport systems will become more popular too. We’re also interested in torque vectoring to help achieve our dynamic performance characteristics. "By 2012, we think most of our range will feature electric-power assisted steering by 2012. Our challenge is to achieve a secure feeling at speed."
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Nobuya Hato,
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