Test Procedures and Evaluation Criteria for the Handling Characteristics of Heavy Commercial Vehicles

In the years past, quite a number of relevant test procedures, including appropriate criteria of description, have been conceived to describe objectively the handling characteristics of passenger cars and passenger car-trailer combinations. Because of the various design principles of commercial vehicles and the ever-increasing advances of vehicle combinations insuring optimum utilization of space, i.e., single trucks or buses, truck-trailer combinations, semitrailer combinations, articulated buses, platform road trains, and short coupling truck combinations, the handling characteristics of these vehicles are definitely more distinct from each other. A description of the handling characteristics as compared with existing designs will be of great importance to the classification of new vehicle combinations. This paper gives a survey of the measuring procedures applied so far and the findings as published on the handling characteristics of heavy commercial vehicles. This approach is compared with measurements taken by the authors for a 16t truck, a 38t truck-trailer combination, and a special type 38t semitrailer combination. Against this background, the transferability of the test procedures, which have previously been applied to passenger cars only, and the required restrictions under their application to heavy commercial vehicles is illustrated and evaluated on the basis of the measurement results obtained. Any measuring variables and criteria of description that are of significance to this particular class of vehicles are detailed.