Objective Harshness Evaluation

A subjective evaluation method is generally used to assess ride comfort of cars. However, this method poses many problems as pointed out later. Thus, it is the important task of automobile engineers to establish an objective evaluation method in advancing the development of vehicles, and in fact, research in this area is being actively made. ^{(1),(2),(3),(4)} This paper describes research on an objective evaluation method for the phenomenon called harshness among other phenomena related to ride comfort, and introduces a newly developed objective evaluation method since evaluation ratings estimated based on this method correlate well with subjective evaluation ratings given by test drivers and, thus, the method has been verified as sufficiently practical.