Controlling greenhouse gas emissions is becoming increasingly more important. With road freight contributing to a significant amount of energy usage, finding ways to improve this sector will, in turn, lead to large reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, with one method to achieve this being to use larger vehicles. Currently, prescriptive legislation dictates the dimensions a vehicle can take. An alternative to this is to use ‘Performance-Based Standards (PBS)’. This involves determining a set of manoeuvres and performance metrics that a vehicle must perform and pass in order to be road-worthy, instead of saying a vehicle can be a certain size or a certain weight. Through innovation and optimisation, using this method will then allow larger vehicles that are safe for driving on the road to be built. The research conducted here involved creating a PBS framework based on low-speed manoeuvrability for rigid delivery vehicles as well as assessing the high-speed stability of articulated vehicles to determine whether they would be safe for use on urban roads. Additionally, design changes such as incorporating rear axle steering were considered to determine whether vehicles that had failed the proposed PBS framework could be made to pass.

控制温室气体排放变得越来越重要。由于公路货运会消耗大量能源，因此找到改善该行业的方法将反过来导致二氧化碳排放量的大幅减少，实现这一目标的一种方法是使用更大的车辆。目前，规定性立法规定了车辆可以采取的尺寸。对此的替代方法是使用“基于性能的标准 (PBS)”。这涉及确定车辆必须执行和通过的一组操作和性能指标，以便适合上路，而不是说车辆可以具有一定的尺寸或一定的重量。通过创新和优化，使用这种方法可以制造出在道路上安全行驶的大型车辆。在这里进行的研究包括为刚性运输车辆创建一个基于低速机动性的 PBS 框架，以及评估铰接式车辆的高速稳定性以确定它们在城市道路上使用是否安全。此外，还考虑了诸如合并后轴转向等设计变更，以确定是否可以让未通过提议的 PBS 框架的车辆通过。