Correlations of subjective assessments and objective metrics for vehicle handling and steering: a walk through history

Achieving customer satisfaction concerning steering feel and vehicle handling requires subjective assessments and tuning of vehicle components by expert test drivers and engineers. Extensive subjective testing is expensive, time consuming and requires physical vehicles, which is in conflict with reduction of development time and cost. Objective testing and model-based development are constantly increasing but translating subjective requirements into objective ones is non-trivial. This paper summarises, discusses and classifies the methods, strategies and findings in previously published research regarding correlations of subjective assessments and objective metrics for vehicle handling and steering. The aim is twofold: (i) to identify key parameters of steering, handling and their preferred values and (ii) to compile and discuss the fundamental issues to deal with in the continued search for correlations between objective metrics and subjective assessments. The paper gives a comprehensive overview and insight of different aspects to take into account when conducting research in this field.