Ride comfort has been always a critical point in the development of a vehicle. In the recent years, has become an increasingly important factor in the vehicle design. Only subjective evaluation of ride comfort is no longer an acceptable or competitive way to assess the driver and passenger experience. And sometimes metrics extracted from measurements are often not correlated with subjective evaluation and with customers feed-back due to difficulties on the process of ride evaluation. Those difficulties are largely due to variations on the tracks where the vehicle is evaluated, on the speed of the vehicle passing through the tracks, etc. In other words, sometimes it is hard to have a process with a good repeatability.
This work suggests a method of ride measurement which improves the repeatability and also creates a possibility to generate tracks for evaluation of specific ride problems. The method consists in a system of track acquisition and ride measurement itself in a 4-Post machine with the inputs given by the tracks already measured.
Some results of the track acquisition system are presented in order to show its efficiency. This is made by measuring well known events like speed bumps. As a conclusion, this work compares the vibration on the driver seat track of a vehicle, measured passing through the track and the vibration at the same point with the vehicle in the 4-Post, having as input the same track measured by the track acquisition system.