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In recent years, the increased use of electric power steering in vehicles has increased the importance of issues such as making systems more compact and lightweight, and dealing with increased development man-hours. To increase development efficiency, the use of a “Hardware in the loop simulator” (HILS) is being tested to shift from the previous development method that relied on a driver's subjective evaluation in an actual vehicle test to bench-test development. Using HILS enables tasks such as specification studies, performance forecasts, issue identification and countermeasure proposals to be performed at an early stage of development even when there is no prototype vehicle. This report describes a case study of using HILS to solve the issues of reducing the load by adjusting the geometric specifications around the kingpin and eliminating the tradeoff by adding a new EPS control algorithm in order to make the electric power steering (EPS) more compact and lightweight.

We have developed Wind Shield Display (WSD), a large-sized head up display with stereovision. Information from the ITS infrastructure, car navigation system, or a variety of sensors including a night vision camera can be superimposed at the appropriate 3D position by adjusting the binocular disparity of the display. By WSD, images will be displayed in the vicinity of the driver's line of sight. The driver can perceive the information with minimum eye movement and reaccommodation time. These characteristics of WSD reduce driver's cognitive workload and contribute to safe and comfortable driving.

As the evaporative emission control of cars becomes severe year by year, lower fuel permeation comes to be required as fuel tube in order to clear the regulation. Although the multi-layer fuel tube that has ETFE as an inner layer and PA12 as an outer layer is used now, development of a fuel tube with lower fuel permeation and better adhesion durability is required. Considering these requirements, we introduced a functional group into ETFE, modified PA12, and successfully developed new two-layer fuel tube systems. The systems do not need any internal adhesive layer. The design of the systems is quite simple, and provides excellent fuel permeability, durability of adhesion and processability.

Due to recent environmental problems as well as requirements for better quality for automobiles, research for high performance asbestos-free friction materials on the brake system was conducted. The mechanism of brake noise and causes for brake judder have been analyzed. As a result of research, non-asbestos, non-steel friction material with main fibers of carbon and aramid was developed. The newly developed friction material showed superior features of higher friction coefficient along with stability, brake noise, brake judder, and wear resistance compared with conventional non-abestos materials. Also, a new testing method to evaluate friction materials were applied.