Steering feel has a high importance for the driver, as it gives feedback regarding the current vehicle state and the drivers steering input, which is necessary for a good controllability of the vehicle. Therefore, a large effort is made during the steering system application to achieve a desired steering feel, mainly based on subjective driving tests.To minimize this effort, to get a consistent OEM specific steering feel for all vehicle models, objective parameters with defined values are required, describing the desired subjective steering feel. Furthermore, objective parameters are indispensable for the virtual phases of the vehicle development process.

In this paper objective parameters are allocated to subjective steering feel characteristics, using literature and expert knowledge as basis. The validity of this allocation is tested with a new method, which gives reliable results for a low number of test participants. A possible redundancy of objective parameters is ruled out by correlation analysis of 250 measured vehicles from many different OEMs. The robustness of the parameters is examined with repeated measurements of two test vehicles.

Final validation of the objective steering feel parameter set is done by using it for a virtual application of a steering system. The corresponding subjective driving tests show very promising results.