The automaker’s testing facilities in Michigan see sims, soak rooms, and wind tunnels push prototypes to their breaking point
Most gearheads know that untold square acres of research and development, not to mention budget, are behind each and every one of the new vehicle models on sale today. But the specifics of that testing and analysis are often shrouded in mystery.
How does a company make sure its shiny new model is ready for the outrageous weather we see in this country? Can it determine the best suspension tuning that won’t rattle fillings out of the driver’s teeth without needing to build a gazillion test mules? And to what extent can it assure customers a new vehicle is going to last over a decade without actually, you know, driving it for the next ten years?
The first stop at the Driveability Testing Facility was a quartet of soak rooms, each about triple the size of a typical commercial walk-in freezer and able to fit up to three cars at a pop. A vestibule area approximately the size of a rural bungalow allows access to the rooms and permits the storage of some vehicles. At the end stood two enormous doors, one of which led to a refuelling area for internal-combustion cars; while the other was a portal to a sealed room which acted as something of an airlock between the outside world and this inner sanctum of simulated weather.
Even that fuelling room is tightly controlled, operating under negative pressure to exhaust any fumes and carefully keeping both gasoline and diesel at a steady 10 degrees C to reduce scientific variables.
Olsen is a wind-tunnel engineer who started his Ford career in the year 2000 as a manufacturing process engineer at Flat Rock Assembly, where he contributed to the launch cars like the 2004 Mustang and 2009 Shelby GT500.
“Sometimes we do a whole vehicle test such as this,” Olsen elaborated, such as if they want to simulate how a vehicle (especially an EV, these days) will react to being left outside in the dead of winter. “Other times, teams will test and focus on a single component like a battery or windshield wiper.” In either case, they hope to far exceed in testing what a customer will actually experience in real life.
Across the way from the frigid Mach-E, another soak room is baking at 36 degrees C, on its way to an asphyxiating 55 degrees C before the end of this day. If you’re wondering, the walls in here are about two-and-a-half-feet thick, or just under a metre, whilst the concrete floors have robust insulation. Despite this, there is plenty of cell service available (proving places like Costco and Walmart could allow our phones to work just fine if they really wanted to).
Another wind tunnel engineer, John Welch, told us it can take about 16 hours for the floor to get as warm as an ambient air temperature of 37 degrees C after the space was used for cold testing. Humidity is kept right around 40% as a control, though that can be cranked as needed. “There’s plenty of precision here, but also trial and error,” Olsen laughs.
For example, the team learned the hard way – “That’s how we learn a lot of stuff,” Olsen grins – not to turn off the snow-making machine until it is out of the frigid soak room, lest it freeze internally like Hudson Bay in February. Adding some resistive wiring, like an electric baseboard heater, apparently helped.
Olsen and company crank the Bronco up to 65 km/h (40 mph) whilst firing snow and sleet at it on similar velocity. Ambient air temps in the wind tunnel are -25 degrees C today, though the gusty winds being generated drive windchill to a face-shattering -70 degrees C. The car being tested will endure this abuse for up to 300 kilometres depending on testing requirements.
But one of the biggest shows is reserved for the company’s main wind tunnel, an absolutely enormous space in which a Mustang sat rather innocuously — except what was happening invisibly around the coupe wasn’t innocuous at all. This is the wind tunnel in which teams test the likes of NVH and aerodynamics, keeping ambient air temps and humidity strictly controlled to eliminate variables.
Generating wind speeds of up to 320 km/h (200 mph) is a towering single fan with a dozen carbon-fibre blades and a stunning diameter of over eight metres. Walking through the blades (whilst it was off, naturally) was like being a set extra in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with its massive scale.
This is the fastest wind tunnel of its type for ground-based vehicles, one whose wind works with an interchangeable rolling road system to help with science-y concepts like air boundary layers and coefficients of drag. After being locked in position, operators can move the car on a turntable up to 30 degrees in either direction from centre, helping engineers take measurements like drag, side force, and downforce. It is here designers will whittle endlessly, chasing fuel efficiency or EV driving range.
What about those famous smoke wands? You know, the ones which visually reveal the flow of air around the finer parts of a vehicle and are a crowd favourite on television? “We only break those out when we’re looking to put on a show,” grinned John Toth, the Engineering Supervisor for wind tunnels in North America. It turns out the smoke generally dissipates into a useless fog at speeds much beyond those found in a parking lot — though we understand why it makes for good theatre.
There’s plenty of precision here, but also trial and error
Doug Olsen, Ford wind-tunnel engineer
After all, cars in the wind tunnel just appear to be sitting there, despite the reams of useful data being collected. If suits from the corner offices need visual justification for spending millions of dollars on a particular aero program, it helps to throw them a bone in terms of something they can actually see.
How far ahead does a company like Ford peer into the future? “We’re working on some 2028 and ’29 models,” Toth grins. Having worked his entire 24-year tenure in the wind tunnels, it’s safe to say the man has seen plenty of product long before it is shown to John Q. Public.
Other courses include a massive 45-degree paved hill (we drove up a one-in-three grade and it felt like ascending the moon) and huge off-road areas. Parts of the course are so brutal on vehicles that most of them run autonomously around the clock, since most surface conditions are too extreme for human drivers.
It all puts an exclamation point on the amount of testing plowed into the development of a new vehicle at Ford. And much respect to those toiling on the development teams — working on a rig sitting in a simulated snowstorm at -75 degrees C is not to be trifled. We’ll take the 55-degree-C soak room, thanks.
Sign up for our newsletter Blind-Spot Monitor and follow our social channels on X, Tiktok and LinkedIn to stay up to date on the latest automotive news, reviews, car culture, and vehicle shopping advice.