As an essential part of the product development and design, the derivation of load assumptions and design requirements has to reflect the concept of the product verification process. An overview is given on the key elements of the process of defining load assumptions for passenger cars where the full set of external loads acting on a vehicle has to be considered, but also the structural response, which leads to the final load requirements on a component level. Some information is presented on the process where load assumption and strength and fatigue design requirements are derived on the basis of a number of sources including systematic measurements on new vehicles, consolidation of measurements within a load data-base, numerical analyses and customer usage surveys. The topic of standardised load-time histories is added by a comparison of load requirements given by CARLOS multi to those obtained from a test track.Keywords: Normalisation of load data / load data of customer usage / MBD simulation / standardised load-time history CARLOS multi / 1 Einleitung