Ride Comfort and Road Holding

The capability to smooth down the road imperfections affects both the comfort and the road holding of the vehicle. Improving comfort means, basically, limiting the vertical acceleration fluctuations of the vehicle body and hence of passengers. Improving road holding means, among other things, limiting the fluctuations of the vertical force that each tire exchanges with the road. In this chapter suitable models for improving the comfort and/or the road holding of the vehicle are developed. Quite interestingly, it is shown that a well tuned vehicle should have proportional damping, although it appears that this aspect is not commonly taken into account in traditional vehicle dynamics. The benefits of inerter in a Formula car are also discussed in detail.