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Recently, there has been increasing interest about vehicle active safety systems to prevent accidents which are caused by adverse weather conditions or inattention of drivers. Especially, ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) systems using radar sensors are the most widespread.[1,2,3] But it has not been clearly suggested how to test the automotive radar which is applied on the vehicle. In addition, it can be tested on limited place like a laboratory for short distance and it cannot be tested for long distance over 50m. Performance evaluation method is verified by comparing the difference of distances between base vehicle (which the radar sensor is mounted) and target vehicle measured by the precise positioning technology and the radar sensor. It is also possible to test ACC system on a driving road over 50m. In this paper, the precise positioning technology using the VRS and INS is proposed and verified.

This study presents a driver side airbag development procedure of a cab-over type light truck which weighs from 2000kg to 3500kg. For the airbag development, crash tests are performed according to FMVSS 208 regulation used for passenger car. Test results are used to develop an airbag ECU and get a vehicle pulse for computer simulation and sled test. This study proposes a modified airbag deployment criterion, T150mm−25ms, for cab-over type truck. A finite element computer model for occupant behavior analysis is developed and utilized to find optimal airbag parameter values. Then, sled test is performed to verify the computed airbag parameter values and tune them if necessary. Finally, crash test equipped with airbag is performed again to check the improvement of injury coefficients. This study suggests three things to overcome the difficulties in femur protection capability.

As global awareness of environmental concerns associated with automobiles has grown significantly, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has emerged as one of the analytical tools to provide environmental information on automobiles throughout their life cycles. In order to be most efficient in terms of both environmental performance and cost saving, it is necessary to perform LCA studies within a short period of time in the automobile design stage. However, since an automobile consists of a great number of components, a full LCA of an automobile takes too much time and expense. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a practical, systematic LCA methodology for a whole automobile, with which a time and cost effective calculation can be ensured for a highly complex system. First of all, the entire automobile is divided into several modules, each of which is composed of 10-20 submodules. In this process, the concepts of part modularization and platform commonization are incorporated.