Abstract
Directional stability is important performance in vehicle and tire design. The current methods to analyze this is generally based on linear concept. Using the existing concept, it cannot realistically explain the subjective assessment at all because it is hard to practically represent the nonlinear behaviour of a complex vehicle system in reality. In this paper, new method to analyze directional stability is introduced. At first, directional stability of vehicle is categorized into yaw, rear axle, and roll stability. In order to objectify these items, driver perceptual parameters based on subjective assessment are used. Using the perceptual parameters, it can successfully explain the transient maneuver of vehicle and extract objective parameters for directional stability. Finally, these objective parameters are successfully validated through two handling tests, lane change and severe lane change. The correlation results show that there exists a good correlation between subjective assessment and the proposed objective parameters.
