Automotive engineering company, Applus+ IDIADA, has invested in an Integrated Vehicle Dynamics & Ride Comfort Simulation Platform. This vehicle development platform enables automotive manufacturers to simultaneously evaluate and optimise both handling dynamics and ride comfort from the earliest stages of vehicle design, reducing development time and costs while enhancing vehicle performance.
“Until now, automotive engineers have faced a significant challenge: while virtual simulation has advanced handling and steering development, ride comfort and NVH – especially in the secondary ride domain – remained difficult to optimise before physical prototype testing,” said Guido Tosolin, senior manager for vehicle dynamics at Applus+ IDIADA. “This integrated platform solves this long-standing industry problem.”
The cornerstone of the platform is VI-grade’s Hyperdock, a lightweight cockpit featuring calibrated shakers at driver contact points. Installed on IDIADA’s DiM250 driving simulator, this configuration delivers accurate high-frequency acceleration feedback, extracted in real-time from sophisticated vehicle models.
The technological ecosystem includes high-definition real-time multi-body models combined with high-frequency transfer function models. The system also includes VI-NVHSim Simulator Software from VI-grade for comprehensive model preparation and acoustic feedback, and a Concurrent RT Machine that supports real-time computing for complex vehicle models with hundreds of degrees of freedom.
According to Applus+ IDIADA the platform provides three critical advantages for automotive manufacturers: it facilitates ‘first-time-right’ prototypes, reducing costly development iterations; it enables a seamless balance of handling dynamics and ride comfort through integrated optimisation; and it allows early subjective evaluation with accurate vibration feedback before physical prototypes exist.
The technology can be particularly valuable for optimising long-lead components such as bushings, subframes and body structures – elements that are typically difficult and expensive to modify later in a development programme. The Integrated Vehicle Dynamics & Ride Comfort Simulation Platform will be available to automotive manufacturers in the second half of 2025.
IDIADA will provide additional details about the adoption of this technology during VI-grade’s 2025 Zero Prototypes Summit, taking place on 13-15 May at VI-grade’s SimCenter in Udine, Italy.
