Abstract
Recently, the global automobile market is rapidly changing in the paradigm to next-generation automobiles with high-efficiency and eco-friendliness due to rising oil prices and strengthened environment regulations. Accordingly, the automobile vendors around the world are competing in development of hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrid vehicles, fuel cell vehicles, electric vehicles and such various vehicles. Before developing the components that such vehicles are comprised of, however, it is very important to predict/assess the performance of the components when used to construct such vehicles using the components to be developed. Yet, it is very difficult to design considering the operational characteristics at the vehicle level during the design stage of the components, or conduct testing/evaluation considering vehicle characteristics. To resolve such issues, this study involved using MATLAB/Simulink, one of the simulation programs widely used by system engineers to construct performance evaluation environment for eco-friendly vehicles, and using 3D rendering tool of Multigen Creator to construct virtual driving environment so as to construct the performance evaluation environment for components of the vehicles. The constructed virtual driving simulator could be utilized for designing core components for Eco-friendly Vehicles, and verifying the performance per vehicle unit.