What is Homologation?

Homologation is a type of certification process that is mandatory for automotive manufacturers to sell their cars in different markets. It is a vital part of regulation for all automotive manufacturers, such as Chevrolet, Ford, BMW, and Audi,, and necessary for all motor vehicle types, from family minivans to luxury Ferrari and Porsche cars and race cars like those used in NASCAR motorsports.

The testing to obtain homologation certification ensures that vehicles comply with the required environmental protection, technical standards, and vehicle safety standards before being sold to the public. This includes investigating all motor vehicle safety features, how the vehicle was built, its emissions, and the performance of the vehicle.

The homologation process has become more stringent in recent years, and vehicles now need to be tested in a wider range of driving environments and driving scenarios, including robustness scenarios. While traditional homologation testing revolved around physical testing only, homologation now involves both physical and virtual testing to better assess the many potential driving variables.

Homologation is a critical piece of regulation that ensures that vehicles are safe for the road and ultimately protects both drivers and passengers. Additionally, it helps companies reach more customers in different regional markets by making vehicle importing and exporting easier, as companies will have already met the requirements of the intended market.

Passenger safety and reduced emissions have been key focus areas for modern-day cars, increasing the importance of homologation and putting more pressure on increasing the level of certification testing needed.

With the approval process for homologation becoming more demanding and companies now having to pass stricter testing requirements, both physical and virtual homologation testing are vital for any automaker selling cars to global markets.

The homologation process now tests many different vehicle environments and safety scenarios, such as weather conditions; day and night scenarios; and pedestrian styles, poses, and walking situations. The results of the tests are combined into a report that proves that the vehicle is compliant with all homologation requirements. Technical specifications, design drawings, and implemented safety features also need to be presented to the relevant body.

The homologation process follows four main steps to ensure that a vehicle is compliant, as outlined below.

1. Vehicle Type Approval

The homologation process starts with the relevant regulatory body approving the company’s vehicle type during the initial application stage.

The process can be performed for cars that are going to be sold in large commercial volumes, as well as street-legal cars that have a limited run to be used as racing vehicles ― known as homologation specials ― that include the likes of the Subaru Impreza WRX.

2. Testing the Vehicle

Secondly, various physical and virtual tests are conducted to see how the vehicle performs under many driving scenarios.

For example, one safety test examines how well a car brakes when pedestrians cross the road in front of the vehicle. Physical testing like this is becoming more difficult and cumbersome because there are now thousands of variables that need to be tested. The homologation process now also requires robustness testing, something that was not always the case. Running all relevant scenarios is too expensive to perform by real-world tests alone, especially for the many edge cases that exist in real-world driving scenarios. This is why more virtual testing (see additional information below) is being incorporated into this step.

3. Inspection of Manufacturing Facilities

The automaker’s manufacturing facilities are investigated and monitored to ensure that the production lines meet the intended quality standards set out in the application. Batch testing will also take place to ensure that all manufactured vehicles consistently meet the same safety standards.

4. Certification

If the vehicle meets all the testing and inspection requirements, the company will be issued a homologation certificate or mark. This is typically the e-mark for Europe, a certificate of conformity (CoC), or a conformity of production (CoP).

After the certificate has been issued, ongoing monitoring and recertification may be necessary to ensure continued compliance. However, once that certification has been issued, the automaker can legally market and sell its vehicle in its target markets.

During the testing stage, all vehicle components are tested to ensure that the vehicle is compliant across all safety aspects. Alongside general automotive components, such as the rearview mirrors, fuel tank, and lights, the active and passive safety components are rigorously tested.

Active Safety: Active safety refers to systems in the car that help drivers avoid accidents, including the steering system, braking system, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) found in most modern-day cars.

Passive Safety: Passive safety systems like airbags and seat belts are deployed when a car can’t avoid a crash — for example, when driving too fast to stop or when an obstacle suddenly appears in front of the vehicle.

Testing for passive safety involves doing physical crash tests with a crash test dummy in the car to determine if the forces inside the car are under a certain threshold during a crash to protect passengers.

The environmental impact of the car is also tested by calculating the vehicle’s pollution, noise, emission, and fuel consumption.

Active and passive safety together form an integrated approach, as depicted in the figure below, that not only reduces the chances of an accident but minimizes the consequences if one occurs.

Homologation is mandatory to sell cars in different markets, but running all the tests in real-world scenarios is costly and time-consuming. Moreover, for recent versions of regulations, such as Euro NCAP or FMVSS 127, simulation is becoming the cornerstone of the assessment process — that is, test authorities review the simulation report and perform a limited number of real drive tests.

Virtual homologation using simulation software, such as the Ansys AVxcelerate Autonomy autonomous vehicle development and safety validation toolchain, can perform simulations at scale with optimized scenario variations that otherwise would not be feasible with physical testing.

Not only does simulation cut homologation testing time — especially with the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) for optimization — the actual time and cost involved are significantly reduced. This is notably true for edge case testing, such as night and fog environments, which can be very costly to perform at best; at worst, they are not reproducible in real-world tests. As it stands, homologation testing is part real-world testing and part virtual testing. In the coming years, there likely will be a bigger shift toward using more virtual testing to obtain homologation certifications. The more testing that can be completed virtually, the cheaper, easier, and quicker that homologation becomes for companies.

In terms of simulation testing capabilities, active safety testing can be simulated more easily than passive safety. Although capabilities already exist for increasing the level of passive testing, such as those being used in consumer testing, getting them adopted for virtual testing has been a slow process. Ultimately, this means that virtual homologation for passive safety is still less widely implemented than active safety, but the technology is there for it to increase soon.

If you’d like to find out more about how adopting dual testing models using physical and virtual homologation testing capabilities can help save you time and money, contact our technical team today.

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