In this work, the crack nucleation under fretting loading is investigated experimentally with a damage tolerant 2024 aluminium alloy. A new method is introduced to determine its condition with respect to all loading parameters including the number of fretting cycles. Further work deals with the prediction of this threshold using the Smith-Watson-Topper criterion. New developments are presented, in particular a process volume of variable size is introduced in the computations of the fretting crack initiation.