Abstract: The invention provides a method of simulating and estimating the minimum lifetime under repeated bending for a wire harness containing a plurality of electrical cables, by applying a compact and lightly equipped device. To this end, representative electrical cables, contained in the wire harness, are subjected to flexing and stretching until they fail under repeated bending, so that the number of bending cycles is obtained for each representative electrical cable. The minimum lifetime for the wire harness can then be estimated on the basis of the shortest cable lifetime that can be found among all the representative electrical cables tested.