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In today's automotive climate, the tendency of an increasing number of vehicle model variants offered is coming to a head with the growing demands for safer vehicles. New legislation now ensures that the safety improvement by the fitment of stability control systems is certified for each new vehicle. Beginning year 2012, all new cars to be sold in the European Union have to be equipped with ESC, and as means to test performance, a new supplement to ECE R13 requires that the Sine-with-Dwell test be passed. As a result, OEMs have to handle the task of demonstrating that all their vehicles meet homologation requirements. With such a range of variants possible in each model, this can lead to an enormous quantity of testing. However, for the first time, ECE R13 allows homologation to be undertaken by test-supported simulation, and it is now possible to transfer more and more of this work into CAE.

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.

In this paper, the design and analysis of a new rear twist beam axle in the concept design phase are reported. The new axle was designed with the purpose of improving the vehicle dynamics performance, improving load carrying capacity, reducing weight and cost. In order to switch from trailing arm rear axle with torsion bars to the new twist beam axle, many packaging issues had to be addressed, the most important of which was to keep the existing fuel tank with minimum or no modifications to the underbody panels. In addition to presenting the design approach, the results of an ADAMS kinematics and elastokinematics analysis and NASTRAN stress analysis are presented.