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This paper presents results of numerical and experimental investigations for the feasibility assessment of drive-by bridge inspection, where the health status of a bridge is solely identified from the dynamic response of an inspection vehicle, passing over a target bridge. To this aim, a novel metric based on the transmission performance between the vehicle and the bridge is proposed, and it is demonstrated that the vehicle having a higher sensitivity index has superior performance, in moving state, to identify bridge frequencies, and consequently separate different states of a bridge from one another. In addition to numerical validation, experimental validation from a laboratory-based experiment is presented, where a two-axle vehicle model is adopted as an inspection vehicle and a single-span steel beam is employed as a target bridge. Vibration data are collected using three highly sensitive accelerometer sensors …