Cold-Weather Testing the 2017 Ford F-Series Super Duty - Truck Trend Network
When Ford invited us to check out the new Super Duty up close in personal, we booked our ticket and headed out to Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, home of Eglin AFB. The largest of the five climate chambers is 55,000–square-foot building that holds an astonishing 3. 25 million cubic feet of air that can be heated to 165 degrees or cooled to -85 degrees in less than a day. While the primary mission of the Air Force–owned facility is to do testing for the Department of Defense and support military programs, the lab is often contracted out for commercial use, such as vehicle testing. In addition to controlling temperature, the lab can set humidity and simulate altitude, and it can test for ice, snow, salt fog, blowing sand, wind, and freezing rain, duplicating just about any weather you can find on Earth in a controlled setting. The lab operates 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, running about 30 tests a year. During our visit, Ford was running a quartet of 2017 Ford F-Series Super Duty trucks through a grueling, non-stop three weeks of idling as a response to customers in extreme cold climates, such as the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. When the Super Duty first launched with new SCR technology in 2011, long-term idling in cold weather was found to have caused delayed issues with the emissions system. Source: www.trucktrend.com
