Whether long-haul trucks or earthmovers, commercial vehicles are designed to carry more weight under more grueling conditions than passenger vehicles. As such, they don’t simply need more powerful motors but they must also be more robust than their passenger vehicle cousins. For these vehicles to meet the performance standards the industry demands, medium to heavy-duty vehicle chassis and components must undergo extensive testing throughout the development process. Vehicle and component testing has been around since the first motorized creations rolled out of their workshops, even if that only meant driving until something failed at first. With the advent of mass production, however, durability and longevity are deal-breaking requirements. Today, no vehicle sold into commercial service will have avoided the grueling iterations of comprehensive testing from the component level up. Dedicated test benches, wind tunnels, rumble tracks, thermal chambers, and countless iterations of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) line the road to production-grade products; whether those capabilities reside in-house or as test-for-hire services, they remain the gatekeepers for new vehicles.

Countless non-descript industrial buildings around the nation host the most advanced testing sites for the latest yet-to-be-released commercial electric vehicle platforms. Bringing those buildings–and the equipment housed there–to life are small armies of experts who bring many decades of experience to bear on the mission to make commercial vehicles robust and reliable. Cutting-edge commercial EV technology is no different, and both components and final product, are put through the proverbial ringer, subjecting new technology to the kind of stress the finished products will experience in the real world. While engineers benefit from long-established testing methods and best practices, pre-production vehicles with the most advanced technology never come with an established testing manual. For novel EV technologies, testing requires instinct, ingenuity, and imagination.

The tools and methods of reliability testing have naturally become more advanced alongside the vehicle technology they are designed to evaluate. This is particularly true regarding the amount of data collected and the analytics required to make data informative. Testing for durability and reliability in automotive applications is central to building vehicle longevity and ensuring that parts meet performance commitments. Assessing things like radiator performance and measuring cooling capacity under real-world operating conditions, for example, allows for continuous improvement in component design. Whether this means running testing processes in simulated environments using wind tunnels, climate chambers, or vibration testing on a rumble track, rigorous testing must be standard practice. The need for the test equipment to withstand the same testing environments as the vehicles naturally also adds to the complexity of the testing equipment.

Over time, evermore eclectic combinations of people, facilities, equipment, and methods must be assembled during the testing phase to replicate vehicle operating conditions in the real world. For example, with battery-powered vehicles like an EV delivery truck, testing validates safety and performance over time, simulating component behavior at the far reaches of the possible ambient temperature range, not only while in operation but, crucially, also during charging.

Instead of relying on a Farmer’s Almanac and luck, commercial EV manufacturers can now rely on a climate-controlled wind tunnel and a climatic chamber capable of simulating extreme conditions. For example, the ability to simulate temperatures as low as -20°F in the wind tunnel and -40°F in the climatic chamber and humidity levels ranging from 10% to 90% in the climate chamber will provide critical insights. Next, the ability to test entire vehicles as large as a city bus in either summer or winter conditions without waiting for the right weather is a game changer.

But testing what is often brand-new technology requires much more than a casual drive into the wind tunnel or climate chamber. Beyond formal training as engineers and technologists, the employees who staff a testing campus must be technical artists ready for (nearly) anything. Countless testing protocols exist for ICE-based vehicles; it’s well-trodden ground. However, the EV frontier is full of new technologies, many of which testing methods have yet to be developed. Any testing facility must specialize in solving these problems through continuous innovation. OEM testing customers that bring their pre-production EVs to a testing campus directly from the R&D labs back at headquarters must create robust data loops that feed information back to HQ efficiently, for example.

During what is usually the first exposure to operating outside of its place of inception, the sometimes exotic infrastructure required to charge electric vehicles or the new set of monitoring sensors requires innovation and ingenuity to get working. During this process, procuring specialized equipment frequently requires stealth and secrecy, akin to high-stakes technology shopping, bespoke equipment setup, and even larger power drops at the last minute. Another type of challenge to overcome is the ability to collect and manage the vast amounts of CAN-Bus data and doing so in a way that a testing team can extract and use it for integration back into OEM R&D systems.

Great advancements in sensor technology and data acquisition have revolutionized vehicle and component testing. And while the engineering teams behind cutting-edge EV startups are typically the very best in the field of electric propulsion, an emerging field, they don’t always have a background in vehicular testing practice or deep familiarity with data acquisition tools. For example, a third-party testing customer may bring their own flow meter for a series of wind tunnel tests. When the sensor and data acquisition systems do not exchange data as expected, the testing staff must work with the customer to troubleshoot and resolve the issue, and keep the testing process on schedule.

For pre-production EVs, charging is often an issue. When the makers of the most cutting-edge EVs seek out testing service facilities, they either bring their chargers or rely on off-the-shelf chargers provided by the facility. Next, the testing team must deploy the charger in the test chamber. However, issues with external charging are not uncommon with very early iterations of pre-production EVs. In those situations, engineers have discovered that the regenerative charging of the traction motors tends to work quite well, even early on. Hence, one on-site workaround is to use a dynamometer to replenish vehicle batteries kinetically instead of via a charger, even if the testing protocol did not call for dyno use.

The mission to redefine boundaries and deliver automotive excellence and innovation such as that driven by the EV revolution also requires innovation outside of the vehicle. Long before the dream of sitting in traffic, testing partner facilities should be evaluated on experience and longevity, on the availability of the most advanced testing equipment and drive-in-sized wind and climate chambers, and an experienced testing team. These facilities should remain at the cutting edge of vehicular testing technology, which necessarily must now include EV technology.