Field Work

By Ed

We’ve shared a lot of videos and stories about track testing the CTS-V, for obvious reasons. But this isn’t a race car. It’s a luxury sedan (albeit a REALLY high-performing one!) That means we’re striving to make it very capable and confidence-inspiring in a wide range of environments. If you’ve been to this blog in the past, you may have seen some of the coverage done regarding extreme winter traction testing.

A lot of that work, of course, involved the AWD system on the “regular” CTS. Even though this is the V-Series, we still went “up North” to do some of the same sorts of tests recently. These shots are from the “snow field” at our test facility in Kinross in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. While it’s still cold up there even in April, these shots were actually taken a couple of months ago when they were still in the middle of winter.

Home on the Testing Range

By Rob

The glamorous world of vehicle testing, indeed.

This shows the cars parked at our development trailers, at what would become the conclusion of the winter-test regimen. We do enough testing up here at Kinross that we have this little “building” as a staging point.

The Taming of the Snow

By Rob

The snow handling course is great for testing tires, StabiliTrak, AWD and Traction Control — all at the same time. This test confirmed that we’ve got the AWD torque transfer right where we want it. The key in designing the torque transfer is to get just the right amount of power to the front axle to keep the car on course.

These challenging conditions for cornering provide a good test for how robust the system is.

Kicking the (Snow) Tires

By Rob

We don’t just test our cars. We even test accessories and parts for them. During our recent Kinross trip, we did a lot of testing and subjective evaluation of various snow tires. We folded these into our ongoing testing and confirmation of our AWD system in these extreme winter conditions.

I’ll post a few of the images of what that sort of testing consisted of. Come back in a couple of days for some of those.

Kinross White Out

Check out this short clip. Just a little view of winter testing done recently at Kinross.

The Kinross Slide

By Rob

This was taken just a few days ago here in Kinross in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s a measurement instrument attached to the nose of the car that we use for traction and stability control tests.

The instrument measures the position of the car’s body as it relates to the position of the wheels and steering input. It is connected to a laptop and other sensors inside the car.

Sliding around on the ice and snow provides us with a very severe and detailed look at how to establish AWD calibrations – particularly how to determine what exact conditions should tell the system to intervene and send power to the front axle.

Checking and Re-Checking

By Rob

As if it weren’t cold enough at home, we’re going back and forth to Kinross for winter and traction testing now. This is a key point in time – we’re checking and re-checking the AWD system and chassis controls in the car, as it’s the first time we’ve put AWD into the CTS. We snapped a lot of photos – this is a rare one in which you can actually see the car clearly amidst the snow that’s constantly falling and the snow being kicked up by the wind and tires.

We’ll have some other shots and stories from Kinross shortly. Also coming soon are some interesting pictures and video from some of the other winter-traction tests we’ve already done – including some from driving we’ve done in other near-Arctic areas in Sweden.

Driving Cadillacs

By Rob

It happens to most everyone. You get asked, “What do you do for a living?” In our case, the answer is "Driving Cadillacs."

Several times a year, we organize long development-drive trips on public roads, striving for a very comprehensive “real world” evaluation. We’ll take a week, sometimes more, and cover hundreds of miles, driving from dawn through evening each day.

I’m Rob K. When someone asks me what my job is, the title “lead development engineer” is not very revealing. Instead, I usually just say that I’m an engineer, and I test drive luxury and sports cars. That usually elicits a response such as, “Sounds like fun,” or, “Can I trade jobs with you?”

Driving the Kinross Tundra

By Rob

Earlier, I mentioned our visit to the frozen tundra of Kinross. Here’s a look across the tarmac. If you look really closely, you can see a tiny little speck just above the horizon in the middle of the picture. That’s a small plane preparing to land. This former U.S. Air Force facility still has a working runway that operates adjacent to the vehicle test site.

The facility is pretty unique. It’s maintained and groomed a bit like a ski hill or an ice rink. There is a big oval course that is probably 1,500 feet or so in diameter. This is sort of a double oval – one is a lane entirely covered in ice, the other covered in snow. We also use a handling course that is basically like an autocross or a simple road course. The difference here is that it is covered with a consistent coating of snow. There is also a “snow field,” which isn’t actually a field, but rather a big swath of tarmac covered in snow. The snow field is used to test aspects such as emergency maneuvers, accident avoidance and lane changes. There are two other “pads” roughly the size of a football field each that are completely ice-covered. We come here so frequently that the company has leased one of the former Air Force buildings as a garage. In the coming days, we’ll have a chance to post some more shots of our cars going through tests that are pretty extreme.