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Brazil has seen an increase in awareness of the effects of automotive safety and emissions, advanced by magazines such as “Quatro Rodas”. Being a member of the Mercosur organization, Brasil supports regulatory harmonization based on European requirements by 31 December 2002. U.S. FMVSS-based requirements that currently do not conflict with ECE-based Mercosur requirements are allowed as alternatives until 31 December 2004. The implications of these regulatory changes for automotive OEMs remain to be seen, but if recent public domain crash tests are any indication of what is to come, Brazil will quickly become the safety leader within South America.

This paper describes a new process being used by Autolatina Truck and Bus Operations, to increase productivity in the analysis and certification of vehicle structural components. It was implemented in 1993. The concept vehicle is designed using Finite Element Stress Analysis (FESA), based on historical road inputs data. Primarily the analyses pinpoint the highly stressed areas, indicating possible weak points of the new structure. These are strengthened prior to prototype build. The concept prototype is instrumented following the needs shown by the FESA. It is then run for a lap on Proving Ground and/or typical routes used by the fleets. Comparing the data acquired in the vehicle with the FESA, it is possible to better suit the design for the real application of the new product. The engineering prototypes are then built and accelerated durability certified to sign-off the released design.

An improved procedure to structurally certify medium and heavy trucks has been introduced to reduce development and certification time, as well as to increase design confidence. The new procedure is based on finite element stress analysis (FESA), laboratory tests, data acquisition, and vehicle durability tests. The vehicle structural durability test has been one of the most time demanding items of a truck program. An accelerated route has been developed, based on data acquisition and correlation analyses, halving the test time and cost.