Difference in chassis setup due to different body variants

Abstract

The automotive industry is one of the world’s most important economic sectors and it is important to reduce cost in development. One way of doing this is to reduce the test time and the number of prototype vehicles built. This thesis is investigating if it is possible to test the lateral dynamic behaviour of a station wagon with only simulations for this vehicle and physical test made with a modified sedan based on the same platform. The simulations were made in VI-Car Realtime which is a table based simulation software. The thesis includes the building procedure of a simulation model in this software, how to adapt the simulation model to the behaviour of a physical vehicle and modifications to this vehicle in order to meet requirements. It was found out that this probably is possible although this study was not extensive enough. The resulting characteristics of the modified sedan is close to the characteristics of the station wagon, but the standard sedan is also very close. This makes it hard to know if the results are due to modifications or from the fact that the sedan and the station wagon are much alike from the beginning. In order to determine this further work would need to be done.