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Overtaking vehicles are among the most difficult driving maneuvers. In particular, young or inexperienced drivers often misjudge the current traffic situation when planning to pass a vehicle ahead. In most cases however, false situation estimations lead to dangerous traffic scenarios. For instance, in Germany about 18000 accidents occur due to misjudged overtaking maneuvers per year. The planning process for overtaking a vehicle requires to gather, weight and estimate different information pieces, like vehicle speed of oncoming traffic, road track ahead, velocity of the vehicle to be passed, etc. Besides sensing information, such a planning process demands a considerable amount of experience, particularly when estimating certain information that cannot be measured or sensed by the driver.

This paper points out the possibilities and capabilities of modern simulation tools. Furthermore it sensitizes the topic of global view of total system beyond the discipline. Special emphasis is placed on the coupling of tools to form an efficient development and simulation environment. As exemplary implementations a dynamic total vehicle model with active suspensions and with consideration of exact elastic component behavior of the stabilizer bars is presented. The models are all created using modern, commercially available tools. To give another aspect to efficient development and simulation environments some hints to the progress of real time applications are made. Finally preliminary and exemplary simulation results are discussed.