This paper provides an overview of a vehicle property database that can be accessed directly by the Human-Vehicle-Environent (HVE) Vehicle Editor. Vehicles are selected from the database according to their type (passenger car, pickup truck, etc.), year, make, model, body style, engine size, and trim package. Each vehicle is then predefined by its exterior dimensions, wheel locations, center of gravity (CG) location, vehicle mass, inertial properties, drive train properties, suspension properties, tire properties, and crush stiffness coefficients. A selected vehicle may be exported into a `physics package' (EDCRASH, EDSMAC, etc.) for use in a reconstruction or simulation. The paper also provides an overview of how the vehicle property database was created. The sources of the data used to define each of the vehicles are specified. Obtaining a complete data set for a vehicle often was not possible. Analysis was performed on the available data to determine trends in vehicle properties. These trends were used to estimate vehicle properties that were not available. The results of the analysis are included in the paper. (A)
Abstract