Objective Driveability Development of Motorcycles with AVL-DRIVE 2014-32-0020

Originally developed for the automotive market, a fully automatic real-time measurement tool AVL-DRIVE is commercially available for analyzing and scoring vehicle drive quality, also known as “Driveability”. This system from AVL uses its own transducers, calibrated to the sensitivity and response of the human body to measure the forces felt by the driver, such as acceleration, shock, surging, vibration, noise, etc. Simultaneously, the vehicle operating conditions are measured, (throttle grip angle, engine speed, gear, vehicle speed, temperature, etc.). Because the software is pre-programmed with the scores from a multitude of different vehicles in each vehicle class via neural networks and fuzzy logic formula, a quality score with reference to similar competitor vehicles is instantly given. This tool is already successfully implemented in the market for years to investigate such driveability parameters for passenger cars.

Due to the fact that electronic systems more and more find their way into the 2-wheeler applications, motorcycle manufacturers are facing a lot of challenges and these are increasing from year to year. Increasing power, with the goal to reduce fuel consumption is just one of the targets OEMs have to deal with. Beside that engines with different calibration versions to fit into various motorcycle classes are brought into the market and need to be objectively judged to fulfil the demands of the different motorcycle applications. At the moment the main point of interests are:

• drive by wire
• traction control, ABS
• different driving modes (throttle/ignition maps)
• electronic suspension
• automatic and semiautomatic transmissions

Some of these development areas are new for motorcycle manufacturers, but they have to deal with it to stay competitive. On top of these points all of them have to come together to the attribute: “FUN TO DRIVE”.

This paper describes the process of adding the capability to assess these tasks in the AVL driveability measurement tool and gives examples how the tool supports the increasing effort in such calibration tasks for motorcycles. The objective driveability tool AVL-DRIVE is providing a lot of experiences on the tasks listed above, based on mature and proven automotive background. Beside the shown examples using this real time driveability assessment tool for more efficient new technology development, the paper summarizes the benefits for motorcycle manufacturers all around the world.