Patent ID: 8290662

Claim:
A method for estimating and monitoring tire cornering power in a vehicle, comprising: receiving signals corresponding to a steering torque, a steering wheel angle, a yaw rate, a lateral acceleration, and a vehicle speed from a steering torque sensor, a steering wheel angle sensor, a yaw rate sensor, a lateral acceleration sensor and a speed sensor, respectively; and sending a notification to indicate that one or more of the vehicle's tires need to be checked or serviced when a tire corner stiffness deviation exceeds a specified value, the tire corner stiffness deviation representing a comparison of a calculated vehicle front effective aligning stiffness with a reference vehicle front effective aligning stiffness, the calculated vehicle front effective aligning stiffness being calculated based on the signal corresponding to the steering torque, an estimated road friction, an estimated vehicle front weight, and at least one of the signals corresponding to the steering wheel angle, the yaw rate, the lateral acceleration and the vehicle speed.