From Temperature to Wear: A Quantitative Analysis of Tire Influence on Vehicle Cornering Using Handling Key Performance Indicators

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Vehicle behavior is strongly influenced by tire performance, as tires serve as the primary interface between the vehicle and the road surface. Since identical vehicles equipped with different tire sets—or even the same tires operating under varying thermal and wear conditions—can exhibit significantly different handling characteristics, this study aims to quantify their impact on both steady-state and transient cornering responses through a dedicated evaluation methodology.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">To demonstrate the generalization of the proposed approach, three completely different validated vehicle digital twins—a passenger car, a sports car, and a formula car—are analyzed in a virtual environment, employing Vi-Car Real Time for vehicle and scenario representations, and RIDEsuite for tire modeling, considering thermal and wear effects. The simulations were designed using a structured design of experiments approach, resulting in 15 predefined combinations of tire temperature and wear states.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Results show that operating outside the tire’s optimal thermal and wear conditions significantly affects vehicle handling balance, responsiveness, and driver perception of agility. These effects scale with tire performance level: while standard passenger car tires exhibit limited sensitivity, slick formula tires show substantial variations in grip and cornering stiffness, reaching deviations of approximately 10% and 35% from their nominal values, respectively.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Vehicle steady-state analyses indicate that front axle wear increases understeer, while rear axle wear reduces overall stability—resulting, for example, in a 25% increase in peak sideslip angle in the sports car configuration. Transient analyses further confirm that temperature has a more pronounced effect than wear, particularly on yaw rate and lateral acceleration response times, with variations reaching up to ±10% relative to optimal thermal conditions.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">This work highlights the need to include tire condition effects in handling target definition and validation processes, recommending careful monitoring of tire states during standardized ISO maneuvers. Fixed metrics should be replaced by performance ranges that reflect actual tire operating states, whether for custom-developed or off-the-shelf tires.</div></div>