Freezing in Florida: The story behind Ford's Sunshine State Winter Testing - Autofocus
All of that is necessary to enter the main chamber at the McKinley Climatic Laboratory, which has been set to -28C so that Ford can winter-test its upcoming new vehicles. “When drivers get into the vehicle, they expect it to start right away and have a comfortable idle speed,” says Rich Shimon, Ford’s technical expert on gasoline powertrain calibration. “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. Three 2016 Super Duty models wear camouflage, since they have yet to be formally launched, and the F-150 , Explorer , and Focus undergoing demonstration cold starts are current models. Ford has been using McKinley for the last decade, usually for three weeks each year, and has booked it for at least the next three years. While it has cold-weather chambers at its own test facility in Michigan, they’re much smaller and have to be shared with other departments. In McKinley’s largest chamber, Ford can bring in 72 vehicles and 54 engineers, all at once, for the entire three weeks. The McKinley Laboratory is part of the Eglin Air Force Base, and came about when the military discovered that many of the new airplanes that had. Source: www.autofocus.ca
