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21st century winter testing – it’s about far more than tyres

Continental’s winter testing facility in Arvidsjaur, just short of the Arctic Circle, is playing a crucial role in helping the supplier make important developments in safety and autonomy. By Xavier Boucherat

Temperatures in Arvidsjaur, Northern Sweden, can drop as low as -40C (-40F) in the winter months. Located a few hundred kilometres shy of the Arctic Circle, the sun appears for as little as three hours a day, and outside of the small town (population 4,500), the surrounding white wilderness stretches out like a desert.

In short, it is not the sort of place you’d expect to see a Mustang, and yet on a nearby runway in mid-February, an orange blur moves at speed into a slalom course, ducking between cones. Things go to plan, until a test engineer in the car flicks a switch, de-activating the next-generation electronic stability control (ESC). The vehicle over-steers into a turn, and safely skids out across the snow.

The runway is a part of Continental’s expansive winter testing facility, opened in 1992. Here the mega-supplier puts a variety of technologies through their paces. Chief among them are the company’s different sets of winter tyres, including offerings for the Scandinavian markets where heavy snow and thick ice are regular features, and Middle-European markets such as Germany, where conditions are seasonal and less harsh. Over 2,000 sets of tyres are tested each winter.

One of those currently undergoing examination is the seventh generation of VikingContact tyres for extreme condition markets. On a purpose-built track cut into the snow, a small fleet of older generation vehicles fitted with the new tyres are being put through their paces. In terms of handling, these are outperforming a fleet of brand new vehicles fitted with older VikingContact tyres, a finding made all the more impressive by the fact that the older models lack modern ESC. Meanwhile, on a nearby frozen lake, a new spiked tyre concept is being measured up against existing technology. The new design houses the spike in a rubber body, as opposed to an aluminium one, which allows the spike to better penetrate the ice while reducing damage done to the road by the spike.

“Not everywhere is like California. A car must be able to recognise these extreme circumstances every time.” – Volker Mornhinweg, Head of Mercedes-Benz Vans

But whilst these developments are important, Arvidsjaur is now also used to test a wide array of chassis and safety features, some of which will prove important as the industry achieves higher levels of connectivity and autonomy. Originally, the runway-style strip was used to test just anti-lock braking systems (ABS) and traction control systems, but today over 30 functions are tested. Along with ABS and ESC, the 1,450-metre track gives engineers a chance to test things like the MK C1 for highly automated driving, an electronic braking system with high levels of redundancy, and sensor-based Road Condition Observer (RCO) technology, which can improve the performance of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as automatic emergency braking (AEB).

The focus for Continental is safety, and the achievement of its Vision Zero goals – zero fatalities, zero injuries, and eventually, zero collisions. With 1.25 million road traffic deaths recorded worldwide in 2015, considerable work remains to be done, particularly in developing markets. Like many, the company believes that the higher levels of autonomy, and the pairing of data with ADAS, could provide a solution.

Alfred Eckert is Director of Advanced Engineering for Continental’s Chassis and Safety Division. As he explains, the Arvidsjaur facility is important for these developments for several reasons. For a start, the extreme conditions make it the perfect place for durability testing, an important consideration with autonomous systems requiring more componentry in the car. But in addition, Arvidsjaur is helping advanced functionalities learn how to read these challenging environments.

Continental winter tyre testing
Temperatures in Arvidsjaur, Northern Sweden, can drop as low as -40C (-40F) in the winter months

“Not everywhere is like California,” he says. “The weather conditions seen up here are something we need to master. We could see an earlier introduction of Level 3 and Level 4 technologies in places where conditions are good, because this is easier to execute, but at the end of the day we have to provide a sustainable, effective system which can handle things like heavy rain. In addition, an autonomous system needs to be able to make decisions like a skilled driver and decide when it can’t drive at all, for example in heavy fog, or blizzards.”

Arvidsjaur, Eckert says, frequently sees these conditions, and thus provides sensors with a template which can then be built into the technology. “This is the minimum we must achieve,” he says. “A car must be able to recognise these extreme circumstances every time. Things would be very dangerous if a vehicle didn’t realise it was driving through fog, for example.”

Thus, the facility is a good place to test the RCO, which uses a camera to determine friction levels on the road, and whether conditions are slippery. This data, along with further information from other sources such as the tyres, vibrations and ABS interventions, can then be fed to the cloud and shared with other vehicles. Arvidsjaur provides the opportunity to test the system’s algorithms, and whether they are correctly recognising different conditions such as dry tarmac, rain and snow.

In another test, RCO is used to feed information to Continental’s motion control technology, which executes autonomous driving itself via GPS. On a snow-covered track at the top of the runway, a Mercedes E-Class uses friction data to determine the top speed at which it can drive itself, and adjusts its movement around the track accordingly.

As Eckert notes, the introduction of technologies such as ABS in 1978, ESC in the mid-1990s and AEB in 2006 has demonstrably improved road safety. In Germany, for example, fatalities per annum at one point reached over 20,000 at the start of the 1970s. The 2017 figure was 3,170. Technologies such as those tested in Arvidsjaur will continue to drive the figure down, but their reliability and robustness will be paramount for OEMs, particularly those that take control out of the driver’s hands, and they will require assurances that systems can stand up to fierce environments. Such is one of the major roles of facilities like Arvidsjaur in 2018 – if it works here, it’s likely to work anywhere.

This article appeared in the Q2 2018 issue of Automotive Megatrends Magazine. Follow this link to download the full issue

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