Paper 3: The Assessment of Vehicle Ride and Handling:

The paper deals primarily with MIRA's contribution in the areas of vehicle ride and handling. Vehicle ride and handling are defined in broad terms to delineate the areas under consideration, ride being concerned with passenger reaction, and handling with the driver-vehicle relationship. The most difficult problem of all ride and handling studies is considered to be the human subject since human variability, adaptability, sensitivity and absence of a fixed scale of values render study in the simpler engineering senses difficult.Instrumentation systems used in the measurement of vehicle ride and handling studies are considered in a general way. A typical ride instrumentation system is illustrated.Assessment of vehicle ride is considered under two headings, subjective and objective. The methods for subjective assessment of stimuli are discussed and as an illustration of the techniques involved the design of a subjective ride experiment is given. Brief details of the objective measurement technique and the wa...