Integrated Vehicle Development

Lotus Engineering is well known for its ability to improve ride and handling behaviour of cars within short development programmes. This ability has its roots in the extensive cumulative experience of its team of development engineers, coupled with a methodical and analytical approach to subjective iterative vehicle development. Objective testing and modelling techniques are not new to the vehicle development process, but analysis time, complexity and reliability have sometimes limited their contribution in the past and the subjective approach has remained the main driving force.

This paper first explains the reasons why Lotus wanted to implement those techniques, what kind of strategy was chosen and what are the results achieved at the moment.