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The early evaluation of vehicle and subsystem concepts, the reduction of the number of necessary test runs, the verification of multiple variants and the possibilities to do quick parameter studies are critical issues in modern engineering where sophisticated simulation methods are used to improve and to fasten the engineering process. Given the future legal requirements for CO2 emissions and the correlated measures to improve the aerodynamics of the vehicle the evaluation of ground clearance is one of the most important topics for the development of future passenger cars. This paper describes how the multi-body simulation environment at GM Europe (GME) - consisting of the Hyperworks/MotionView pre-processing, the Virtual Modeling Components (ViMC) library and the Adams solver - is used to simulate ground clearance load cases (e.g. driving over curbs, ramps and speed humps with distinct speed and with distinct steering angles).

Due to the increasing number of body styles, engine/gear combinations and the variety of modern control systems, the use of simulation techniques becomes more and more important in the development process of classical chassis’ as well as Chassis Control Systems. Following GM's Road-Lab-Math (R-L-M) strategy, the number of prototype cars in ongoing and future vehicle programs will be significantly reduced. The goal is to cancel one hardware step for all future vehicle platform derivatives. Therefore, this paper describes the enormous success of CAE utilization within chassis development and -; based on that -; in virtual application and release of chassis control systems.