I am interested in creating a [Pacejka Tire model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_B._Pacejka) in Gazebo and during the past several months I have been looking through many examples and I have not seen any examples of vehicles with more complicated tire models. Is it difficult to implement something like this in Gazebo? If it is a straightforward thing, how would I go about doing it? Would I need to write a plugin?
Previously I looked into using the validated vehicle models in Chrono in Gazebo using [this code](https://github.com/scpeters/Chrono_Gazebo/blob/master/gazonoVehicle/gazonoVehicle.cc), but was advised against it as Chrono is moving towards developing their own virtual environment and sensor models etc. But, since these sensor models and the environment does not seem as mature as Gazebo and does not integrate with ROS, I decided to stick with Gazebo.
I have been bouncing around a lot between using Chrono, Gazebo, and now I am toying with actually using [ANVEL](https://anvelsim.com/home) to develop an AV simulation environment. Ultimately as always it is a trade-off and for me I want mature software that is easy to use, but model fidelity is also important to me.
I am leaning towards Gazebo because it is mature, open-source, and well developed. But I am concerned that, while way that Gazebo defines the model is very straightforward, it seems rigid. In that if I wanted to add, for instance the Pacejka tire model it may be difficult.
At the end of the day, what I am wondering in this question is, how flexible is Gazebo in adding a (possibly external) model of some physical phenomena? For instance, if I have some C++ code that calculates tire force, can I inject the output of this easily back into Gazebo?
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