The making
of the perfect drive
Volvo
creates cars that are as good to drive as they are to look at. In order to
achieve this, that means testing its cars to the limits – from the heat of the
desert to the extreme cold of the Arctic Circle.
WORDS
STEPHEN WORTHY PHOTOGRAPHY ANDREW SHAYLOR
Volvo has
been testing cars at their winter facility inside the Swedish Arctic Circle for
30 years
During the
lingering northern Swedish winters, temperatures regularly drop to -35˚C and
below. By comparison, the cold box of your average domestic fridge freezer is
-18˚C. And yet it is this extreme cold that makes it a perfect environment for
testing Volvo cars.
Lying just
inside the Arctic Circle, in Swedish Lapland, Volvo Cars’ winter testing
facility is celebrating 30 years of helping make its cars more enjoyable to
drive, more reliable and able to cope with any condition. It’s part of a
network of facilities and public road tests around the globe, where Volvo’s
vehicle dynamics experts assess, refine and improve the driving attributes of
their cars. Across tens of thousands of miles and over thousands of hours and
in all conditions imaginable – whether stifling desert heat in the USA,
pothole-strewn northern European public roads and, here, in the Arctic – Volvo
Cars leaves nothing to chance when striving to make cars that can cope with
anything. There is even a high-tech driving simulator at Volvo Cars HQ, that
allows engineers to ‘drive’ in any conditions they want, without even leaving
the comfort of the workshop. It’s another example of Volvo Cars’ craftsmanship
and attention to detail.
The winter
testing facility isn’t on any map. And yet, despite being on the edge of
civilisation and fiendishly tough to find, Volvo engineers regularly undertake
an odyssey to get here from their Gothenburg HQ, involving multiple flights and
hundreds of kilometres of driving.
It is
mid-March. The near perma-darkness of the Arctic winter is losing its annual
battle with daylight, but the snow is ever-present. Up here they call this time
of year ‘the fifth season’ – not quite winter, not quite spring (although our
breath clouds suggest otherwise). Trees stretch out in seemingly infinite
fashion along the roads, boughs bent over in snow-laden genuflection. It feels
like driving on a giant luge track.
Once we
arrive at the test site – no Volvo signs, no fanfare – we pass through an
anonymous-looking security barrier, before driving along a network of icy
thoroughfares until we reach Volvo Cars’ workshop facility. A rectangular green
box lurking behind a three-metre-high security fence, it’s the hub of the
activities here. A pride of cars, many of them wrapped in the telltale uniform
of development cars – black & white zebra camouflage – line up outside.
Inside, however, it is warm, the atmosphere calm and focused. Surrounding us
are a clutch of ‘zebraed’ cars, many raised high on vehicle lifts. Mechanics
are buzzing around them. Some have their heads under bonnets, others are
analysing streams of data from their computers. We could be at a car testing
facility anywhere in the world, but we’re not. We’re at 66°N latitude – that’s
5° further north than Anchorage, Alaska.
In one of
the workshop’s sparsely-decorated offices emerges Roger Wallgren, attribute
leader in vehicle dynamics. He and his team are responsible for chassis
development and fine-tuning – they develop the driving ‘character’ of every new
Volvo. As we talk, a delivery driver drops off a parcel containing some
newly-designed and manufactured suspension parts that Roger has ordered to be
fitted to a test car. We maybe tens of kilometres from the nearest settlement,
but true quality requires such a supply.
Roger pulls
on a wooly hat and a thick, thermal coat – we’re going outside to drive cars.
This is certainly not your normal day at the office. Beyond these workshop
walls are conditions as extreme as you get in automotive testing. Spread over
thousands of hectares of dramatic Arctic scenery is a network of icebound test
tracks – high-speed straights, off-road courses, slippery ovals and tight
circles.
‘It’s about
achieving predictability and that feeling of confidence, consistency and
controllability’
ROGER
WALLGREN
Attribute
leader, vehicle dynamics, Volvo Cars
Here, Roger
and his colleagues put test vehicles through their paces, noting how each
reacts to different road surfaces, temperatures, speeds and steering inputs. In
order to capture and interpret every byte of data, each car is hooked up to a
laptop, secured to the centre console by a bracket. This is for good reason, as
we find out. The extreme conditions are matched by the extreme manner that
Roger drives these cars in order to get things just right. A flying laptop can
do a lot of damage.
I’m sat in
the passenger seat as Roger zigzags down an icy straight whose surface is
scored, as if by a metal comb, with long, deep ruts. Through a series of firm
steering inputs and a balletic dance between brakes and accelerator, he pushes
an all-wheel drive XC60 to its limits. Despite the vigorous treatment he is
dishing out, he and the car feel well balanced and in control. So, what’s Roger
looking out for here? “It’s about getting that feeling of confidence,” he
explains, leaving plumes of loosened ice in our wake. “You put a car to the
test using different kind of steering inputs – quick inputs, slowly increasing
inputs – to see if it does what you think it will do. It’s about predictability
and that feeling of confidence, consistency, controllability. You need a car
that will provide feedback to a driver, so they can feel what’s going on.”
“The end
game here is the confidence that the driver will feel when they drive it,”
explains Roger. “When a car comes to the end of its grip, is it easy and smooth
to control or snappy? We want it to be predictable and easy to control. This is
not just a winter car or a summer car – it has to be good in all conditions.”
The
following morning, we have an early start. The temperature is -31˚C…
artificially generated. We’re inside a freezer box. Part garage, part
industrial fridge, it allows Volvo Cars engineers to mimic extreme ‘cold
starts’. Spend 10 minutes inside here and your thighs feel like a side of
chilled venison, every breath you inhale courses through your lungs like you’re
swallowing icicles. A new Volvo XC40 has been shut in overnight. When the
freezer box doors are opened and the car rolls into the morning sun, the warmer
air outside – it’s a sweltering 2˚C, in comparison – causes the condensation on
the car to form mist clouds. There’s now half an hour to get the car out on the
test routes to take full benefit of the car’s lowered temperature. Are all
mechanical fluids working properly? Steering? Electronics? Will it start first
time? The answer is yes. This is a car that has the strength of character to go
anywhere.
Roger is
deep in concentration as he drives. You can almost see his own internal
computer making tiny calculations. “I love the problem solving and engineering
parts of my work,” he says. “What we’re doing here is balancing our latest
driving technology with the skill, expertise and experience of Volvo Cars’
engineers, who all love driving. This meeting of art and science allows us to
create such a natural, rewarding driving experience.”
It’s this
combination of extreme attention to detail, expert human input and innovative
technology that lies at the heart of this new generation of Volvo Cars – a
definitive mark of quality.
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