Golf Car and Personal Transport Vehicle Brake-Induced Directional Instability—Testing and Simulation Validation

Full-scale instrumented vehicle dynamic brake testing of golf cars and Personal Transport Vehicles (PTVs) is presented and compared to the predictions generated by a previously described simple Matlab-based dynamic vehicle simulation program employing commonly used automotive vehicle modeling techniques. It is shown experimentally that many current golf car and PTV brake designs, which employ brakes on only the rear wheels, can lead to rollovers if the brakes are applied while traveling at high speed, on steep downhill slopes, and/or on low-friction surfaces and that this behavior is exacerbated by lateral forces such as steering inputs and road superelevation. After summarizing four rollover case studies, test-specific and parametric simulation results are compared to the results of full-scale on-site testing and are shown to provide accurate predictions of the resulting vehicle motions, including brake-induced yaw instability and subsequent rollover.