BTW a million miles testing across who knows how many cars is not a lot. I suspect I will ask for my money back if there is no action soon.
If only prototypes were tested and then these prototypes will be given to, let's say to Magna, to make a production vehicle out of it, the production vehicles will not be the same and not tested as close as the protoypes.
To me it looks like the prototype testing we could see on videos etc. were some kind of a proof of concept and parts of the concept (a concept not everybody must agree with, but as long as it proofs what Ineos wanted...ok). These protoypes were hand made and thereby they are not comparable to production cars. At least the early ones were made for different purposes, not for an overall test. The ones I had in December 2021 were produced as show cars. Bad and stupid placed suspension and other things, but that was ok, they were made to look at the exterior and to drive around a little bit, nothing more. There were also protoypes for other purposes, harmonization, suspension, engine and gearbox alignment, you name it...
The question is, if ever production vehicles (and enough of them) were tested that way, that close, that hard, on real roads over thousands of miles? Also to check the build quality. You can see mainly bad production quality here which bothers people, not the concept.
If you look at established manufacturers, let's say Mercedes, BMW or VW, they have a pre-production plants, where building the car is tested, trained and checked to receive feedback and feed that back again to change what is needed. Change alignment of parts because mounting them is too complicated or takes too much time, changing procedures, the order of mounting, all that....
(there are manufacturers who can do that completely based on CAD data in a virtual environment, Ever seen this? A guy has an electronic sensor glove and can practice to place or replace parts on a virtual car to check if it can be fitted at the corresponding assembly point or later by the service. However, real world tests are always following. BTW, the ranking of the insurance class of a car in Germany depends also on how easy parts can be replaced. The manufacturers specifications for a car note which class of serviceability must be reached by the engineers and designers to receive a better insurance class. The specifications are normaly required by and signed of by the board)
When the pre-production phase is finished, a few cars will be build on the normal production lines and handed out to the employees, mainly people which are involved with that modell, like QS managers, engineers etc. They must drive a certain amount of kilometers and give feedback. What is about the noise, are there squeaks, is the fuel consumption as expected, handling, all that and especially all the points of the specification which must be fullfilled. If minor problems are identified, they keep the build cars as they are (many of the test cars are not sold off then) and after, let's say 200 pieces build, the fix is implemented to all following pieces.
Mercedes figured out once that their textile roof of their E-Class convertible made a lot of noise at certain speeds, which they tried to stop by increasing the tension of the cloth. The car was already in production. Only by chance the head of the roof production figured out, after having his test car standing at home in the rain, that the noise was gone. He got his experts for the roof and noise departments together and they detected, that the tension was too high and that the tension needed to be lowered to a certain value (what the water has done). In the past they always used very high tension exact for the reason to prevent the noise. And that worked well. So they did it again, but at this and only this E-Class it had to be the other way around. The reason behind that was the specific distance between the roof sticks of that modell. There are more interesting examples of such incidents, also coming from customer feedback, that could fill a book.
Another example is the W140 S-Class. It was scheduled for 1989 and it was ready. They would have launched it. But then they looked at BMW and their upcomig 7xx line and they were not satisfied anymore and they still saw some problems, so they started a re-design and re-engineering of the car which took nearly three years, to get the product and build quality right. What I try to say is, that a manufacturer did spent another three years on its car just because they felt it is not good enough anymore. In Germany the W140 was not the right car at that time, but many claim the W140 as the best S-Class and car you could get. And outside of Germany it was a success.
These tests with real production cars to get resilient results are very important. I doubt that these tests were done, at least in a required amount.
AWo
