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Developments of new Electric and Hybrid propulsion systems demands chassis adaptations. The purpose of the XeV project was to develop and integrate a full suite of active chassis systems to deliver a fully electrified All-Wheel-Drive Pick-up truck. To achieve so, a new chassis frame, engine cradles and battery box were designed to bring direct drive from electric motor to wheel. On the other hand, for a four-wheelindependent-drive, a new rear suspension design was implemented, and a complex torque vectoring and traction control strategy was developed to provide optimum on and off road performance. All systems were tuned to meet the new drivetrain configuration, weight distribution and vehicle loading conditions making it possible to achieve comparable results with respect to the original combustion engine vehicle.

The movement towards the electrification of vehicles is well documented and the difficulties associated with it are well known. However, obtaining performance equivalent to combustion engine vehicles remains a big challenge. Indeed, although an electric driveline configuration has a lot of potential benefits, these are not always fully-exploited, and the integration of such drivelines generally means a lot of compromise decisions. For this reason, electric vehicles for urban usage are mainly developed, and few vehicles with specific characteristics such as off-road capacities, are introduced to the market. In this paper, the advantages of using electric driveline for 4WD purposes are presented. Applus IDIADA and Metalsa have taken on the electrification of a pick-up vehicle through the development of an intelligent 4WD vehicle platform which includes active safety systems and a new vehicle chassis design.

The comfort of the passengers during normal vehicle ride can be affected depending on the speed of the vehicle and road profile, yet the control of the vehicle is also compromised if the parts in motion deliver high amounts of energy. This document discusses the improvement made on a pick up truck that shows questionable ride and poor control when driving over soft and rough roads at several speeds. A different rear suspension proposal helped to alleviate the problem partially via kinetic energy reduction on a rear live axle. Further tuning opportunities were detected as a result of Subjective/Objective assessments and modeling.