Automotive Systems Engineering Handbook

Modern vehicles are engineered across mechanical, electrical, software, and safety boundaries at once - a chassis decision changes a battery duty cycle, a software update changes a wear pattern, and a thermal margin decision changes how much power a motor can deliver.
Most references cover only one of these domains at a time, leaving engineers to reconcile mechanical, electrical, software, and safety decisions on their own once real trade-offs collide.
This handbook teaches vehicle engineering the way real programs run: one coupled system, developed through a consistent requirements-to-verification process, worked in full across eighteen chapters from foundations to field lifecycle.
What This Book Covers

• Work through requirements engineering, traceability, and vehicle-level requirements from stakeholder need through controlled change.
• Apply system architecture, functional decomposition, and interface control as a binding technical contract.
• Derive vehicle performance from first principles: road load, tractive force, acceleration, gradeability, and range.
• Compare propulsion architecture across combustion, hybrid, battery-electric, and hydrogen fuel-cell systems.
• Integrate chassis, steering, braking, and vehicle dynamics with body structure, crashworthiness, and occupant packaging.
• Engineer thermal management, low- and high-voltage electrical power systems, and software-defined electronic architecture.
• Work through sensors, actuators, networks, diagnostics, and embedded control and model-based development.
• Build reliability, functional safety, safety of the intended function, and automotive cybersecurity into every subsystem.
• Integrate driving-automation systems and assemble verification, validation, compliance, and homologation evidence.
• Carry a vehicle through manufacturing readiness, quality, sustainability, and field lifecycle management.