Accurate & reliable vehicle testing

It takes many years for a new car design to go from the drawing board to production. The test and validation phase is vitally important, and feeds back into the design process to improve performance, reliability, fuel economy, comfort and safety.

Vehicle testing involves putting every system on the vehicle through a demanding set of routines under many different environmental conditions. This is to simulate every kind of use likely to be experienced over the life of the car. During these tests, the vehicle is monitored by a staggering array of sensors which are logged and analysed afterwards by specialised teams of test and development engineers.

The quality of the sensors used in this process is paramount, as the costs of operating and testing a prototype vehicle, often in a foreign country, are very high. If new sensor technology comes along it takes a long time before the engineers trust the results.

GPS: The new era of vehicle testing

Before 2002, automotive companies used fifth wheels, radar sensors, microwave sensors and optical systems to provide speed and distance measurements during proving ground testing. Whilst these sensors gave good levels of accuracy in perfect conditions, they suffered on snow, loose, uneven and wet surfaces. They often took a long time to fit, and were vulnerable to damage.

However, when the US Government switched off the deliberate scrambling of the GPS signal, Racelogic saw an opportunity to use satellite signals to measure speed and distance, without any of the downsides associated with the previous technologies.

When we first introduced GPS to the vehicle test departments of the major OEMS in 2002, the engineers responsible for speed and distance measurements spent a long time satisfying themselves that the results matched their existing fifth wheels, optical sensors and microwave sensors, which were traditionally used for this job.

After many tests by different interested companies, it turned out that the VBOX was in fact more accurate than any previous method, and quickly became a favoured instrument due to its size, ease of use and versatility. Since then, the Racelogic VBOX is in daily use in almost every single OEM Vehicle Test Department around the world both at proving grounds and on the road.

Customer Profile: Continental Automotive Systems Continental are behind numerous innovations in driving safety, producing products for many global vehicle manufacturers. For the test and development of their ADAS products they needed a flexible data acquisition system to help them quickly measure complex data with maximum accuracy. Rob Cavanagh, Lead ADAS engineer at Continental: “The VBOX ADAS system has proved very useful. We even use it in client demos, which give a great illustration of the accuracy of our products against the VBOX benchmark. I especially like its ability to be installed in two vehicles, zero the distances out, and be testing in just 15 minutes.”

Brake testing is a very popular application for VBOX. For example, VBOX 3i accurately samples the speed and g-forces 100 times a second along with a brake trigger input which is scanned 100,000 times a second. Using in-house developed algorithms and advanced calibration techniques, the braking distance of a vehicle can now be measured to within ±1.8cm.

After many years of research and development that continues to this day, we believe we have the most accurate and reliable vehicle testing systems on the market.