This book addresses the interplay of forces in motor vehicles and their movements. Using the language of technical mechanics, it primarily provides insight into the dynamics of motor vehicles, or, to use a term from vehicle engineering, it discusses the driving characteristics of vehicles. First, there is a brief overview of the entirety of the issues.

A four-wheeled vehicle, when viewed simplistically in terms of its structure and the four wheels, consists of five individual masses that are movably connected to each other through guides, springs, and dampers. Since each freely movable body, when simplistically considered as rigid, has six degrees of freedom (three translational and three rotational), the total number of degrees of freedom for the entire vehicle is 5·6 = 30.