Durability engineering for vehicles is about relating real operational loading to the actual strength of the product and its components. In the first part of this paper, we show how to calculate failure probabilities and safety factors based on the load and strength distributions. We discuss the uncertainty within the estimations, which is considerably large in case of extremely small failure probabilities as required for safety critical components. In the second part, we focus on modelling and simulating the loads based on real vehicle usage. The resulting statistics allows to understand and quantify the usage variability. The idea is to simulate thousands of vehicle life spans of, say, 300.000 km or 15.000 h of operation each. The input data for such simulations can be either geographic data like road network, topography, road conditions, traffic data, and points of interest. Alternatively, or supplementary, it can also be properly segmented rich data from measurements in real usage. The results are statistically well qualified durability load distributions and load targets, given as high quantiles of those distributions.
