WHETHER ON city streets or on desolate country roads, no matter what you drive, you're probably blissfully unaware of the lengths your car's maker went to in order to bring it to your local dealership showroom, writes KEVIN HACKETT
Sitting there, nicely polished, under the flattering halogen lighting, just months before any new car hits market, the pre-production test models would have been leading a life so punishing you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
Next time you make yourself comfortable in the driver's seat on a cold wintry morning and turn the key (or more likely these days, push a button), safe in the knowledge that it will start and get you where you want to go, spare a thought for the engineers that have made it so. For theirs is a life of extremes.
If you're writing a cheque for €200,000 before driving off in a new Ferrari, Porsche or Bentley, you would rightly expect your car to have been thoroughly tested in its development schedule. Yet think of any Ford, VW, Opel, Fiat or Hyundai and the story will be the same. From the arid heat of desert wastelands to the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle, your car will have seen and done it all, so you don't have to.
So why do car manufacturers go to such extremes, when the chances are that the nearest their products will get to such conditions is usually a frosty morning start or a comparatively mild European summer? Volvo, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the first company to see the benefits of testing in extreme, real-world conditions. It started to test its cars in the coldest parts of its home country, Sweden, in the 1960s.
The tests were all about making sure a car could start and stop in extreme cold, but there's much more to it than that these days.
Twenty years ago, cars were pretty simple things. Mechanically straightforward, the most complex part of most vehicles was a fuel injection metering system or its anti-lock brakes.
Nowadays there is so much electrical componentry that the car simply could not function without, it must prove it can withstand the toughest that Mother Nature can throw at it.
In northern Sweden, far above the Arctic Circle, the cold is unimaginable. Even at the high point of the day, temperatures struggle to get past minus-30. Remove one of your gloves and your hand feels like it's starting to die within a few seconds. So Volvo built a research and test centre there, which turned out to be a rather deft business move because they also hire out the facility to almost every other car manufacturer.
When a new car is being developed, usually two prototypes are handbuilt for initial evaluation purposes. One will be used for powertrain and vehicle dynamics testing, the other for thermal and cooling system development.
Once this is complete, a handful of test cars or "mules" will be built in order to develop every aspect of the model's performance and handling. Once the basics are right, a series of verification prototypes are made to get the finer details right, such as braking, tyre specifications, air-con performance, exhaust system design and so on.
Every week in Motors there is spy photography of these development vehicles. They are heavily disguised in bewildering camouflage so we can't see what a new car is going to look like before the board-approved, official press imagery is released. The horrific cold of a Swedish winter isn't enough to put off the intrepid photographers though - it's a lucrative business, and there's no shortage of new metal being put through its paces.
During these phases of development testing, a car will often rack up mileage equivalent to driving round the world five times. "We are acting as the customer," says Volvo's field testing manager, Stefan Andersson. "Everything should work as the customer expects it to, even in these extreme conditions."
He says the days when engineers could fix a problem using what they carried around in their toolboxes are long gone. "These days we need to be software engineers . . ."
In the punishing cold, things we take for granted are fine tuned. Windscreens need to clear within a specified time; climate control systems need to maintain the right temperature difference between the occupants' feet and head; traction control systems need to keep you pointing in the right direction; and door and window seals need to keep out the wind, rain and snow. There should be no loss of visibility and steering and brake mechanisms need to function the same as if you were in the south of France on a summer evening.
While all this is going on, other test cars will be pounding the hallowed tarmac of Germany's infamous Nürburgring, getting the handling, brakes and performance the car to within specified parameters. Here, too, manufacturers have set up camp and the surrounding countryside is littered with industrial units where they've built various test centres. Germany is also one of the last countries on earth with a fairly liberal take on speed and the network of autobahns where a car can be driven flat out on public roads is another huge bonus.
At the other end of the temperature scale from Sweden, evaluation vehicles are put through their paces in the hottest parts of the planet. Death Valley, California, is a favourite. Spain is often used and then there's the Middle East. . .
IT'S IN THEdesert storms of Kuwait that I find myself in a pre-production Aston Martin Rapide during the final stages of its hot weather testing. Aston's chief engineer, Simon Barnes, explains why we're in the barren wastelands bordering Iraq. "We can replicate extreme temperatures back at the factory, but there's really no substitute for real-world conditions.
"Out in the desert there's more than ridiculous heat to contend with (the car's external temperature gauge is showing 52 degrees). The windborne sand gets everywhere and etches glass, numberplates, you name it. We have to make sure these ordinary things can last, especially here because many of our customers are based in the Middle East and will experience these conditions, first-hand.
"The driving standards in places like Kuwait city are appalling, too," smiles Barnes. "Cars are driven bumper to bumper and in this heat that puts extra strains on the cooling systems because less air flows into the front of the car.
"The gridlock at rush hour is another telling time and the data logger we have in the boot space is constantly monitoring the stresses experienced by the Rapide throughout the day."
The data collected from the dozens of sensors is fed back to the factory via e-mail every night and software tweaks are returned to the team in Kuwait so that, where necessary, performance of key components can be improved.
Parking up for an hour or so as we go for lunch, the undisguised Rapide is left "to soak". That means it's left in the direct sunlight at the hottest part of the day so that the air conditioning system can be tested. Climbing back inside the car, it's like an oven and it hurts to even breathe, but within a few seconds the cabin has returned to its chilled former self. Barnes is happy with the time it takes to reverse the stifling heat. The beautiful four-door Rapide, it would appear, is Kuwait-proof.
While it's true that we don't put our own cars through anything like these extremes, it's reassuring to know that they could, if required, cope perfectly well. And while the cold, harsh Atlantic wind may feel very, very harsh as you're scraping the snow and ice off your windscreen in the depths of December, you know that in a few seconds your car will be running, warming you through and ready to get you where you need to be. The really hard work has already been done.
"Climbing back inside the car, it's like an oven and it hurts to breathe, but within a few seconds the cabin has returned to its chilled self