TECH BEAT: MAKING OUR VEHICLES TOP GEAR TEST PROOF!

Introducing the Vehicle Durability, Robustness and Towing Attribute department

“The truth is, the Range Rover had cleared every hurdle we’d thrown at it.”

That’s a quote from Paddy McGuinness on Top Gear, just before they threw one more challenge (or hurdle) at our New Range Rover.

It cleared that hurdle too by the way and it was always going to because of the hard work that’s done long before it’s available to anybody externally and that also applies, of course, to our customers.

In Product Engineering, we aim to create a Modern Luxury Customer Experience that allows for Supreme Driving, as set out by our Technical Ambitions and Strategic Themes. But both of those characteristics are extremely subjective to each of our customers.

For some it means having a vehicle that can handle extremely hot conditions and still provide peak performance. Whereas others may need something more suited to colder temperatures. Some may require the capability to drive on rough terrain, through cities, across sandy beaches, up hills and mountains – the list goes on and on.

The gist is that our cars need to be able to handle every single condition, temperature, terrain, load and use-case that it can be expected to face. This is where our Vehicle Durability, Robustness and Towing Attribute department come in.

They bring together all commodities and systems that make up a car and ensure they are as durable and robust as possible for every kind of customer and their respective need.

This process happens through the whole life of vehicle development from product intent, requirements and targets through to physical test assessments. It also requires the team to take a customer requirement, that might seem simple at face-value, and turn that into engineering targets to satisfy.

For example, if we need to develop a car for a customer that wants to drive in the dessert, this doesn’t just mean the product needs to be able to drive on sand. It also has ramifications for the temperature the vehicle needs to be able to operate at, the amount of Solar Loading on the car, sealing for sand ingress, protection against underside abrasion, the ability to regulate the temperature inside the car, the different kind of vibrations, again the list goes on. 

This is why cross-functional work between the vehicle systems and the component owners, and the fruits of that relationship, are vital to delivering a car that is robust all-round and our Durability and Robustness team facilitate that.

They conduct multibody simulations (MBS), analysis, finite element analysis (FEA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and CAD to ensure these requirements have meaning and relevance to the groups who create the components. 

Once the vehicle has been engineered to meet the requirements and standards, and assessed using virtual tools before a physical vehicle has even been build, the team then begin to validate these requirements with real cars, in real situations. This is where we come to what happened on Top Gear (Series 33: Episode 4). 

The program illustrated the breadth of usage that the Range Rover is capable of – but our Durability and Robustness team covered all the bases before filming took place:

Gallery

Jump (Bridge Jump, Vertical Wheel Load Extreme Strength Events (EE))

We are fortunate to have fantastic testing facilities our Fen End and Gaydon Proving Grounds, which allows us to put our cars through their paces in real life environments.

During the Top Gear testing of our New Range Rover there is a clip of the vehicle airborne as it’s driven through off-road terrain.

Pictured right above, you can see an extreme event test, which is similar and was conducted prior to the Top Gear filming. The car pictured went through at least five repeats of the test of going over a Hump Back Bridge at speed to ensure there would subsequently be no breakage, fractures, cracks and damage.

They also conducted Multi-Body Simulation to capture the interactions between the different systems, produce Virtual Road Load Data that is then shared and reviewed together with Chassis Loads for further cascade.

Robustness to Off Road Driving 

Also at our Gaydon Proving Ground, our team managed to test the Range Rover for Engineering Standards around it’s susceptibility of damage to the underbody and front end of the vehicle during off-road driving.

Our team internally evaluated the ability of our vehicle to protect components during severe and extreme off-road customer usage, or during accidental underbody impacts. The three images directly above show the testing we’ve conducted to observe the impact of Sand Dunes, Block Strikes and Step Downs.

In the virtual programme phases, the Durability & Robustness team run CAE (Finite Element Analysis) for these test cases, provide detailed report outs and loads to ensure parts are strong enough prior to any physical parts being released.

Because of the work done in both the physical and virtual phases, long before our car rolls onto the doorstep of Top Gear’s set, our underbody components provide protection by either deflecting, deforming or if necessary, letting the driver know that they are exceeding the capability of the vehicle.

Wading and Mud & Ruts

There are two ends of the spectrum here. On one side you have the basic need for the vehicle to be frequently capable of driving through shallow depths of water. On the other side you have some of what was shown on Top Gear – the capability of our car to slowly drive through deep water.

Again, our team tested our product against this extreme use case to ensure it remained fully functional under water wading and road splash conditions, typical for the target market & classification of vehicle.

These tests were conducted at an external facility and the most extreme test of a use-case included driving into deep water, stopping for a few seconds, driving forward, stopping again and then reversing all the way out.

The Durability & Robustness team support the system and component teams during design phases with cutting edge computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. This isn't just a video, it's detailed loads and stresses to ensure parts are designed to meet the wading and splash use cases. 

All the above are just a sample of the work that the Vehicle Durability, Robustness and Towing Attribute department undertake to make things like the Range Rover segment on Top Gear possible. But it doesn’t stop there by any means. 

The teams’ requirements test the vehicle for just about everything from its performance on motorways, to altitude on mountain passes, to the off-road examples highlighted above. Some of these tests can be done internally using our own resources but others require the team to travel to regions that boast conditions more akin to what our customers are looking for and they are at the centre of every test we do.

Providing customers with a seamless but exceptional experience means ensuring that all systems are functioning for every customer – all teams in Engineering, including our fantastic Vehicle Durability and Robustness team are essential to providing a top tier performance to our customers.

For more information on the activities above and others conducted by our Vehicle Durability, Robustness and Towing Attribute department, please contact Claire Turner or Gabriel Gainham.