Test

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all the innovation and technological advancement North America is known for we often cater to the lowest common denominator. Companies seeking to put their product in as many hands as quickly as possible scale back the “awesome” to just “pretty good” and release it to the masses.

In automobilia you need not look further than the plethora of concept cars that grace the spinning stages at every auto show. Many of the features in these one-off proof of concept vehicles don’t see the light of day due to regulations but many of the technological advancements don’t make it into production simply because we wouldn’t be willing to pay for it or we’re just not at a place where our realm of reality is ready to accept it.

This idea – that beneficial technology needs to be proven and not just great out of the box – was made clear to me in the early 1990s when I was telling a friend about e-mail.

“There’s no way Canada Post is going to let you send an e-mail to someone half-way around the world in seconds,” she said.

She was partly right, Canada Post wasn’t letting me do it, it was (at the time) small Internet companies run by a handful of forward-thinking people who wanted tomorrow today.

Recently Mercedes-Benz held an event in Stuttgart, Germany, home of one of their large complexes and an epicenter of engineering and research. They were showing off a couple of new engines, an R&D facility and autonomous driving system. It was easy to marvel at the lengths M-B goes to in order to produce high-quality end products but it was just as easy to be jealous of the technological innovations that won’t be hitting North American shores any time soon.

Stop Start Technology

If you have ever driven in a hybrid or a Porsche Panamera then you may be familiar with stop start technology. It’s a simple concept: when the car comes to a stop, at a stop light, for example, the engine shuts off. When the driver releases the break the engine starts up again.

Mercedes-Benz says this can lead to a fuel savings of up to 20 per cent and they’re putting it in their vehicles with internal combustion engines.

What makes this specifically interesting is what M-B’s engineers have done to make the process faster. Of the two engines being shown off in Stuttgart (a V-6 and a V-8), the V-6 incorporates an innovative piezo direct fuel injector that knows which piston needs to be filled with gas in order to get the engine started again as quickly as possible.

Sounds like a great idea, right? So why don’t we have even version 1.0 in Canada?

Dr. Leopold Miculic, vice-president of engine development, who oversaw the development of this technology was delicate but very clear about the reason this won’t be reaching our shores in the near future.

“There’s a technical point where the North American customer is very specific about what response they want from their engines,” he said.

Basically, we’re too impatient and red lights and stop signs to wait the half-second for our engines to start back up.

Unfortunately he’s not far from the truth. An auto journalist who had been testing the Porsche Panamera for a week said he would sometimes turn the feature off as it kind of got annoying (read: he was in a hurry).

Admittedly, Miculic did say this technology would reach the North American market eventually; it won’t be enabled by default. Instead the driver would have to select it by hitting an “Economy Drive” button or something of the like. In addition, the technology that allows the engine to start up even faster than normal won’t be a part of the picture.

North America’s fuel quality across the continent is horrifically inconsistent. The sulphur content is just too high, especially in the mid-western United States. If this improves then we’ll get the new tech too.

The motivation to clean up our fuel should be on, too. The piezo direct fuel injection process uses about 10 per cent less fuel than previous versions. If Mercedes-Benz is doing it, it would be long for other manufacturers to copy the process but they won’t be able to until our fuel gets cleaner.

Engine Testing

Just outside of Stuttgart is a city called Sindlefingen. It’s home to a Mercedes-Benz facility dedicated to putting new engines through their paces. M-B isn’t convinced the internal combustion engine is going the way of the Dodo so inside one of their engine testing facilities their new V-6 and V-8 engines are being put through the paces.

One particular building is several floors tall with the middle hollowed out. Mercedes-Benz loads the equivalent of a shipping container with the guts of a car — the engine, transmission and exhaust manifold — and a giant crane loads as many as 35 of these into the building. Once loaded, each engine is run through a real world simulation with each engine experiencing a tiny variant. Technicians collect the data and load it onto a server so M-B engineers can study the results.

In one particular test, one of their next-gen engines was being run at 230.5 kilometres an hour for five minutes and then returned to idle only to be ramped back up again. The exhaust manifold was so hot is was glowing bright red.

Hans J. Knemeyer, manager test bench at the facility has a grin from ear to ear as he shows off the lengths gone to for the sake of better engineering. Germany is as excited about engineering as Canadians are about hockey and this single facility is their ice palace.

“The engines are powered from a central fuel system,” Knemeyer says. “Their are five tanks in the ground and it can serve up to 13 different fuel types. The tests run in 30 minute cycles and each engine will receive 50 hours of testing.”

This is how Mercedes-Benz finds out how their engines will react in the real world. If a component is going to fail on the road they’re going to find out here first, if there is a more efficient way to run an engine at idle, this testing will reveal it.

“This (facility) is purely about engineering,” he says. “We just want to get data, lots of data and provide it to the engineers.”

This facility runs seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The night shift’s responsibility is to ensure the tests are running smoothly but the rest of time different variances are being plugged into computers that control the engines. Each engine being tested is matched to the actual transmission and exhaust system that it would be fit with in an actual car.

As we leave the facility the engine inside the testing room starts to ramp up again. The loud hum levels off as it reaches 230.5 kilometres per hour. Here comes the data.

Autonomous Driving

Furniture and toy manufacturers have been using robots for decades to test the durability of parts or how much pressure joints and pieces can withstand before breaking. It’s fairly normal to see a demonstration of this in any IKEA where an arm is pushing down on a chair or opening and closing kitchen drawers in the exact same way over and over again.

Testing cars has been a different story. In most cases it’s a human being that gets behind the wheel of a car and puts the vehicles through a series of acceleration and braking tests. They weave it between a series of pylons and make abrupt lane changes. Crash testing of course has long been automated but that’s the extent in the automotive world.

Mercedes-Benz figured this wasn’t good enough. The problem: humans can’t possibly recreate the exact same condition over and over again. Plus, with some of the tests M-B wanted to run, it wouldn’t be entirely safe for a human to be behind the wheel.

Overlooking a large asphalt pad is a two-storey control tower plugging data into computers that will be relayed to two vehicles parked at opposite ends of the pad. A timer counts down from 10. Car one springs to life makes its way down to the far end of the pad, as car two begins to accelerate. Car one turns around heading towards the north/south lanes of an intersection painted in the middle of the pad while car two continually accelerates towards the east/west.

They miss by maybe a foot.

This will happen a hundred more times with minor variances and the cars will follow the same path deviating no more than 3 cm.

The cars are being driven by robots: one controlling the steering, another the brake and another the accelerator. A GPS unit atop the car that uses both satellites in the sky and a local transmitter on the ground allows the technicians to put the cars through the routes each time with the confidence it will happen exactly as they say.

Mercedes-Benz is doing this to find out more about their vehicles. For example, when does an airbag deploy? Suppose your car drives into a ditch – if the airbag deploys right away and your car continues moving forward you won’t be able to control it and if the vehicle ends up hitting a tree the airbag has already deployed and will do you no good when it really should have.

They’ve tested how sensors react when a car suddenly cuts in front of you are in (as we witnessed) intersection scenarios all with finite accuracy and without putting human life in danger. The data is studied by M-B engineers and vehicles are fine-tuned based on the results.

“We are the only ones doing this right now,” a Mercedes-Benz representative says. “But we hope other manufacturers start following suit.”