New BMW three Series Sedan enters final phase of testing

The new generation of the sports sedan is getting into the final phase of an substantial programme of testing that each and every new BMW model need to go by means of as component of its pre-production improvement. Here, the complete variety of stresses and strains a automobile will encounter more than numerous years of daily driving are reproduced in concentrated kind.

From extended periods driving flat out to endless cease-begin visitors, sub-zero temperatures to searing heat, twisty nation roads and higher-speed autobahns to pothole-infested tracks, ice and snow to gravel and desert sand, the prototypes sent by means of the test programme for the new BMW three Series Sedan have knowledgeable every thing their production equivalents will come across in daily life.

Only they have completed so at a a lot larger level of intensity and with seasoned created engineers on board to record in detail the pre-production model’s each and every response to the numerous climate and road situations and numerous other influencing elements. In brief, the testers make certain that there are no situations – nevertheless uncommon – which may well compromise driving pleasure in the final production automobile.

In the Death Valley, in the US state of Nevada, it is not only the automatic climate manage method of the new BMW three Series Sedan that can count on a taxing perform-out. The multi-day heat tests see the vehicles fried repeatedly in the sun for a number of hours, then cooled and completely checked more than. Everything has to perform, there can be no squeaks or creaks, even when the temperature tops 50 degrees Celsius in the shade outdoors the automobile and 60 degrees inside, and the interior is then cooled once again as rapidly as feasible.

The heat undoubtedly provides the electronics some thing to feel about, but that is not the entire story: The electromagnetic rays emitted by the hydroelectric plant at the Hoover Dam represent the ultimate test of strength for the functional reliability of the electronic systems on board the new three Series. This is why, all the car’s functions – from the digital instrument cluster to the tyre stress indicator – are tested extensively in the shadows of the massive forest of electrical energy pylons on the banks of Lake Mead. At the identical time, yet another improvement team is placing engines, transmissions and brakes by means of their paces.

They are even provided police protection for their runs up and down the four,000m higher Mount Whitney. While law enforcement secures the test route at the leading and bottom of the climb, the testers hustle the prototypes time and once again up the snaking roads and back down, accelerating difficult and braking all of a sudden to a standstill with crushing frequency. The bone-dry desert roads of Death Valley and beyond also supply an perfect spot to locate out how successful the cars’ flaps, doors, bonnets and lids are at maintaining out dust. In their test drives about the gambling hot-spot of Las Vegas, the engineers leave nothing at all to opportunity.

There could be couple of higher contrasts with the hot-climate testing in the US than what goes on at the BMW Group’s winter testing centre not far from the Arctic Circle. Arjeplog in Sweden gives the excellent situations for a testing programme that eclipses something day-to-day driving in central Europe, North America or Asia can throw at a automobile.

However, Arjeplog does not only give the prototypes the opportunity to demonstrate their imperviousness to intense cold it also offers the stage for the new model’s chassis controls systems to show off their complete variety of skills. The closed-off expanses of ice supplied by Lake Kakel and the ‘Mellanström-Runde’, a single of the most well-liked test routes about Arjeplog, couldn’t be much better suited for fine-tuning the DSC stability method and its myriad functions. Indeed, on this glassy surface, you do not require to drive rapidly to provoke the manage systems into action and as a result analyse their responses. All of which permits the hyperlink-up in between DSC and the xDrive all-wheel-drive method and the interplay with the new BMW three Series Sedan’s M Sport differential to be refined down to the final detail below continuous situations.

Here once again, cutting-edge technologies assists determine and regularly get rid of weak points.

Information Source: Muscat Daily