Positioning — when to use VDSim, and when not to

This page helps you pick the right tool, including not VDSim when a production suite is what you need. It compares tool classes by category and intent, not by accuracy, and does not name commercial products.

No parity claims

VDSim does not claim to match or replace commercial production tools. It makes no commercial tire-product parity claim, no real-vehicle validation claim, and no production sign-off claim. See Validation.

By category

Tool class	Examples	Strengths	Trade-off vs. VDSim
Commercial full-vehicle suites	—	production-validated full-vehicle fidelity, GUIs, vendor support	closed source, licensed, heavier to script and embed
Open multibody dynamics	Project Chrono	general multibody, broad physics	not control-focused; VDSim uses it as an independent cross-check
Game / AV simulation engines	CARLA and similar	sensors, rendering, scenarios, traffic	vehicle-dynamics fidelity is not their primary scope
VDSim	—	deterministic, per-wheel ground truth, scriptable, open core, control-research focus	experimental, pre-validation, not a production reference

Where VDSim is the right choice

• You need a deterministic, scriptable plant inside a control or estimation loop, not a GUI workbench.
• You need per-wheel ground truth (slip, load, force) as observable signals.
• You want an open core you can read, modify and cite, with every check reproducible from the repository.
• You study the friction-limit gap between a kinematic design model and tire dynamics.
• You need many fast, resettable copies of the plant for learning or sampling (RL environment, Experiment API).

Where it is not

• You need a production-validated full-vehicle model with vendor sign-off — use a commercial suite.
• You need sensor simulation, rendering or traffic — use an AV simulator, and consider VDSim as the ego plant inside it (example).
• You need validated ride / NVH or detailed K&C — out of scope.

Relationship, not rivalry

VDSim's verification uses these tools: pure-slip tire forces are cross-checked against a commercial Magic Formula tyre implementation and against Chrono's independent Pac02 on the same public .tir parameters (Validation). The framing is complementary: VDSim is the open, deterministic, embeddable plant for control research, and it says so without overclaiming.