Ford gets chill with winter testing - Toronto Star
“One of the things we’re looking at is cold starts,” says Rich Shimon, technical expert on gasoline powertrain calibration for Ford. Our job is to make sure our vehicles do that under any conceivable condition and with any conceivable fuel, and now we’re doing the extreme cold-weather testing. Many fighter planes wouldn’t start in the cold during the Second World War, and since it couldn’t count on consistent weather outside, the U. S. government commissioned the facility for testing during equipment development. Ford uses the big chamber for three weeks each year, primarily because of its capacity. “We’re able to get 72 vehicles and 54 engineers into the chamber,” Shimon says. Back in Michigan, his team has to share Ford’s four smaller test chambers with other departments, and it would take months to do what he can achieve in Florida in three weeks. The Super Duty trucks were fired up at the start of testing, and will idle 24 hours a day for the full three weeks. Engineers often come in from other countries to work on the testing, since fuels can vary in different areas. “It’s a key component in how the vehicle starts, and one of our key responsibilities is to find the optimized settings regardless of the fuel you have. Source: www.thestar.com
