To supplement and support the focused transportation research of the institute, VTTI facilities feature a fully staffed garage and machine shop to instrument experimental vehicles.
Technicians and engineers use machine shops, welding shops, electronics laboratories, and garage facilities to customize research hardware and software, often designed to collect large amounts of data. These facilities are also used to support the maintenance and expansion of the Smart Roads' systems and capabilities. Additionally, VTTI utilizes numerous vehicle bays, including a dedicated seven-bay 14,400-square-foot garage. This facility is used to store VTTI's instrumented vehicle fleet and the equipment necessary for research and Smart Roads operations.
A large and varied fleet of instrumented vehicles is outfitted with instrumentation packages that can be quickly tailored to the specifications of a project. Vehicle instrumentation is capable of recording a variety of data in real time from a suite of sensors and cameras that are inconspicuously mounted. A large number of vehicles have been used in numerous safety and human factors studies. Areas studied include in-vehicle displays, driver distraction, collision warning systems, fatigue assessment, navigation systems, intersection collision avoidance, and automated driving systems.
Light passenger vehicles, commercial heavy vehicles, bicycles, and motorcycles are among the fleet maintained on-site through a full-service vehicle maintenance operation. Loaned vehicles are maintained in cooperation with the organization that provided the vehicle.