Abstract
Up to now the behaviour of passenger cars under crosswind conditions are mostly examined with crosswind blowers on test tracks. Such driving tests are not producing reliable results about the vehicle behaviour under natural sidewind conditions. In addition there is no method for the determination of the crosswind sensitivity of cars on public roads. Therefore no meaningful assessment of different vehicles for stochastic crosswind situations is available. To give a proposal how to define crosswind sensitivity for cars on public roads, new results have been developed within a PhD-programme. For measuring the sidewind disturbances while driving on public roads, a special measurement device has been built in ika. Sidewind velocity and sidewind angle can be identified during normal driving. Steering wheel angle and yaw rate are the other essential information to evaluate crosswind sensitivity. By this equipment and the usage of a relatively simple bicycle model two crosswind-sensitivities can be defined: 1. Crosswind sensitivity for the closed loop system (with driver reactions) 2. Crosswind sensitivity for the open loop (vehicle alone). The test procedure itself, the prerequisites and some first results will be shown in the paper. One of the targets for this presentation is to start a discussion about the proposal and to find out the possibility to generate new standards for objective evaluations of crosswind sensitivity.