About 100 miles north of Los
Angeles International Airport in the Mojave Desert you’ll find Kia’s 4300 acre
test facility. The South
Korean company has been rigorously testing its vehicles here for just over a
decade, with the view to building world-class cars and SUVs.
CarAdvice has been invited
onto the test track surrounded by camouflaged test mules to get an idea of what
goes on behind the wall fences and razor wire.
Photographers camp out in
the desert for weeks on end trying to get a shot of vehicle we’re going to be
standing next to and in some cases driving. Its a rare privilege. We’re not
allowed to photograph anything, so the accompanying images are as basic as you
get – suffice to say, there’s plenty of top-secret testing going on. During our
visit we lose count of the number of prototypes working their way round the
various test tracks.
“The facility was
constructed between February 2003 and December 2004 at a cost of US $58
million,” explains Matt Seare, facility manager VE – California Proving Ground.
It’s a long job title, but Matt has a pretty important job managing the testing
of nearly every new Kia model.
“The Kia Proving Ground has
quickly become a very important part of Kia’s global development,” says JH So
from Kia’s global PR Team. “It
provides not only on-road and off-road testing and assessment facilities, but
also allows colleagues in other areas of development to put materials and components
through the most strenuous conditions due to the climate in Mojave.”
At the immense facility you’ll find ten
separate courses that are used in a variety of ways to torture the vehicles.
They include a garage of different tests all designed to best replicate the
kind of stresses daily driving put on a new vehicle.
The high speed oval is self
explanatory and allows testers to run at set speeds for as long as they like.
There’s a gradual uphill climb that starts at three percent, moves to four
percent and finishes up at a 12 percent gradiant. It mirrors what you might
experience on a long climb up a country road.
The vehicle dynamics area is
especially interesting. It is designed to test the limits of adhesion and the
capabilities of the suspension system at speed, while the Winding Road Test is
like a mini racetrack within the large oval.
The straight stability
surface has been tailored with a visible crown in the centre of the lanes. It’s
cambered surface ensures the tyres pull left and right to test both steering
dynamics and response. The Special Surfaces Test section is also interesting in
that every lane – across six lanes – has a different texture.
“This area is mainly for NVH
and chassis development,” says Seare. “The chassis guys love being able to
closely monitor what is happening across an array of different and challenging
road surfaces.”
The gravel road and off-road
sections aren’t super tough, but they put plenty of twist and torque through
the chassis, while the section Kia engineers call the LA Freeway is an exact
mirror of a section of, you guessed it, LA freeway, that the government closed
down overnight to allow Kia engineers to
measured and take readings of all the various surface imperfections and
replicate them on their own test section.
The durability loop
incorporates different aspects of day-to-day use like a curved block road, a
sharp 16 degree driveway entry, twist ditches, a sine wave, a rail crossing and
even a grit trough where the vehicles plough through a bath that shows them
with gravel, grit and mud. All up, there’s a combined 120 kilometres-worth of
testing road at the facility.
“All vehicles, even the
sports cars, use the off-road test track,” says Seare. “As you experienced, it
isn’t a hardcore off-road track but it is used to assess vehicle durability
over rough surfaces, dust intrusion into the cabin, noise and insulation, that
kind of thing.”
CarAdvice is particularly
interested in the weathering facility, which is new to the complex. Adjacent to
the engineered tests, a brand new Hyundai Genesis has been sitting out in the
elements for two years. “We expose our parts to the UV radiation of the sun,”
says Seare. “We use a special system to accelerate the weathering process and
then measure that against real world measuring of a car just weathering in the
sun.”
This process is applied to
all aspects of a new vehicle including interior parts, door panels, headlights,
clusters, mirrors, bumpers, as well as full vehicle weather.
“It’s a solar measurement
area so we can measure exactly how much solar energy is going into the part,”
says Seare. “Not just the time the part has been sitting in the system.”
The Mojave Desert might not
be as extreme as what we experienced a day earlier in Death Valley, but the
extent to which Kia is now testing it’s global fleet is one aspect of the
brand’s success. We’ve had a window into a part of the vehicle development
process that we rarely see.
Thankfully, AutoGuide.com‘s
spy photographers have caught the new Kia Sportage
driving on public roadways fully exposed, giving us a better look ahead of the
vehicle’s public debut at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show. Sporting a whole new
bold look, the Sportage
is designed by Kia’s European studio in Frankfurt, Germany, with input from the
automaker’s Korean and U.S. design centers. It’s been heavily inspired by the
Provo concept, especially at the rear of the crossover with angular tail lights
and chrome accents.
