Gone are the days that the car manufacturer will need to keep sending vehicles to different parts of the world to test the cars' performance in extreme weather conditions. Thanks to the genius of the people from Mercedes-Benz, the climatic tunnel is now full functional.
This tunnel can create different temperatures from 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees and more. It also can simulate hurricane like winds of 165 mph and rain. Each tunnels has twin-axle roller dynamometer with speed that can reach 265km/h.
Although these tunnels will be used to measure weather conditions, it will not be a substitute for road testing, according to Ulrich Mellinghoff, Head of Mercedes Safety Development, “We don't want to use the new climatic wind tunnels as a substitute for road testing, but we can now do less of it and are also far better prepared when we do go out. For example, if we have 20 different engine heat shields, we can already eliminate many of them in the climatic wind tunnel because they don't have the desired effect.” He also added, ““We will then go on to do real-life testing with just the most promising two or three variants. We therefore spare ourselves a lot of very time-consuming road tests early on, and yet our prototypes are still at a much further advanced stage of development. And that means that we can meet our very challenging objectives much sooner .”
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