Golf GTI

Make
Volkswagen
Segment
Hatchback

Volkswagen held a wide-ranging talk on vehicle dynamics on Monday. It was about how VW can continue to make its cars comfortable, but also fun to drive. We've previously talked about how the company, even in its regular cars, builds better handling vehicles than most of its competitors on the market. It's about mechanical engineering, obviously, but software has been taking over for a few years now.

"Ten years ago, the development of vehicle dynamics was very much prioritized by mechanical assistance. The basics of today's car, the kinematics, the differences in suspensions, the tire behavior, stabilizers, how our springs are working, all of that stuff had very high priority in the past," said Karsten Schebsdat, head of vehicle dynamics and chassis control. "Meanwhile we have changed that over, we know what the best compromises are with respect to the basics, but we put the mechanical stuff more and more behind the software stuff. The actuators, the vehicle dynamics manager, the electronic power steering system, the software has a lot of influence with respect to the driving dynamics."

So, the software has to work with the hardware to make a car that "feels" good to drive. Agile but not nervous. It should talk to you "like a good friend" and feel like one piece, says VW. We agree, but the problem is that one man's too-harsh car is another woman's too-soft car. There didn't used to be a one-size-fits-all answer.

"The subjective evaluation of a car, to translate this to objective criteria is a very difficult job," said Schebsdat. "And we've done a lot of development work in the past to develop some criteria with a good correlation of what you feel in the car. And by having that we are able to feed our full vehicle models we use in the simulation and get some results of those objective criteria, and we find those in the measurements of existing cars."

Thankfully that helpful software can spread the enjoyment to a wider audience, mostly with suspension adjustment, but also with steering, throttle and brake changes in many cars. The latest Golf GTI has a 15-way setup for the suspension between super soft and super stiff. In our estimation that should cover about 97% of the drivers on the planet.

The next big thing, or the current big thing, is communicating all this new dynamic information to the driver, audibly, visually and through haptics. It's being used now in everything from lane keeping to backup sensors to seatbelt alerts. But with autonomous driving on the horizon, it will become even more important for the driver, and the world around them, to know what's going on.

"The way the car behaves and moves, the impression to the passive driver is totally different than to the active driver," said Schebsdat about autonomous versus self-driving. "Therefore, we have to do a great job in smoothing out those motions of the car [when in autonomous mode] but still keep the VW dynamics DNA inside that. Right now, we're trying to optimize this with objective criteria."

And really, that's the promise of "computers" and "software." They're supposed to do the difficult and repetitive calculations quickly, and translate that to the mechanical hardware, so us carbon-based meatbags can get down to the business of enjoying life. As long as we're aware of what they're doing, this should all be a good thing. We're not looking for some kind of Skynet situation here. On the other hand Porsche's new predictive software looks pretty cool.