Parking gear is essential parts of automotive to park on flat or slope ground. Parking of, especially, big-sized vehicle such as bus and truck is very important problem related to safety. Stability of parking gear may differ from contact location between parking gear and pawl. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of stability depending on contact location using numerical analysis. Furthermore the results obtained by numerical analysis were applied to real vehicles to evaluate established-product of parking gear. As the results, safety criterion of parking gear showed below 0.31ton and thus it was confirmed that parking gear of this study was suitable to small-sized vehicle.

We investigate the role of contact location information on the perception of local features dur- ing contour following in a virtual environment. An absolute identification experiment is conducted under force-alone and force-plus-contact-location conditions to investigate the effect of the contact location in- formation. The results show that the participants identify the local features significantly better in terms of higher information transfer for the force-plus-contact-location condition, while no significant difference was found for measures of the efficacy of contour following between the two conditions. Further data analyses indicate that the improved identification of local features with contact location information is due to the improved identification of small surface features.