Smart sensors and transducers are being widely employed in the development of electronically controlled systems such as advanced suspensions in order to improve the performance guaranteed by terrestrial vehicles. Nevertheless, a standard reference for the full exploitation of the smart features is not yet extensively adopted. The CAN-bus is only used for the communication functionalities within a sensor network, resulting in cost-effective and more reliable connections. An original data driven approach, based on both the CAN-bus and the IEEE ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 Standard, is proposed for the characterization of suspension systems of two-wheel vehicles with regard to the comfort and vehicle handling. Thanks to the ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451, the data acquired from sensor are sent by means of a GPS-GPRS module to PC software that implements the processing algorithm. The proposed methodology includes a low cost measurement set-up, data processing algorithms in both time and frequency domain and the introduction of model-free synthetic indexes in order to experimentally compare the on-road behavior influenced by different damping characteristics for the suspension system. The method is applied to the on-road verification of the riding comfort assured by different control strategies for semi-active suspensions.