Correlation of Subjective Assessments and Objective Metrics for On-Center Feeling

Steering feeling plays a critical role in the driving experience and is one of the most significant topics during a new vehicle development process. To reach a consensus for the customers’ satisfaction in both the subjective and objective characteristics in a particular market segment, there have been several studies to investigate the correlations between subjective and objective evaluations of on-center steering feeling. However, it is still not clear how to determine the steering characteristic based on the correlations. In this paper, a series of new correlation between subjective and objective evaluations are built, which focus on steering effort, on-center feel, torque ripple, torque dead band etc. Firstly, we extract a set of objectives metrics from on-center handling test based on ISO 13674-1 2023, which are followed by professional test drivers or tuning experts. Secondly, we list numerical on-center handling tests of vehicles to test and verify the representativeness and discriminability of above metrics, these vehicles covering different motorcycle type, various brands and diversity tuning styles. At last, the optimal steering feeling is developed based on the subjective and objective characteristics which have achieve customer satisfaction. The proposed correlation shows great potential in helping engineers streamline the design and development process of the steering system.