Assessing and analyzing driveability

Engineers use in-vehicle data-acquisition and analysis tools to develop and refine vehicle calibrations for good driveability performance.

Vehicle calibration is a bottleneck in the development process. It expends a significant amount of time and resources, and major elements of the activity are reliant upon the knowledge and skill of experienced calibrators whose subjective impression of vehicle performance guides the way that calibration is developed.

Therefore engineers at Ricardo Consulting Engineers are employing in-vehicle tools to assist in the calibration of vehicle driveability. The tools are intended to bring an analysis capability into the vehicle, to go alongside the experienced calibrator, and provide the means to develop an objective methodology for driveability calibration. The tools include the instrumentation and data acquisition needed to measure vehicle and powertrain performance characteristics; the data-processing and analysis environment to examine and interpret measurements; and access to a database of performance characteristics that have been found to correlate objective measurements with subjective ratings for driveability.