GLOBAL FACILITIES

Cold-weather tests don’t come tougher than those in Arjeplog, Sweden, and International Falls, USA, where – in the depths of winter – cars are ‘cold-soaked’ overnight in temperatures as low as -40ºC, before being expected to start faultlessly the following morning.

In the dry Arizona deserts around Phoenix, USA, our cars are pushed to the limit at temperatures up to 50ºC to test hot weather performance, brake cooling and in-car ventilation, while paint panels are kept outside for three years to test fade resistance. We also use the mountain roads of Denver to test engine and transmission calibration at high altitude.

_{Jaguar F-PACE – Extreme Weather Testing}

“Altitude affects how the engine and gearbox interact,” says Ged Pybus, Senior Manager for Automatic Transmission Systems. “You have roads as high as 4 350 m in the Denver area, 2 250 m in Mexico City, and up to 4 700 m in China, India and South America. There is a huge variation in engine performance as a result of the thinner air which the transmission has to recognise, and adapt to.”

We’ve also expanded our testing investment in the Middle East, with a facility in Al Barsha, Dubai – perfect for off-road testing of SUVs on some of the toughest sand dunes on the planet.

We don’t just push our cars to extremes of temperature. On the 12.5 kilometre high-speed banked oval of the Nardò Ring in Italy, prototypes undergo a 35 000 kilometre durability run, over a week or more, at close-to-maximum speed, while the suspension is optimised on the facility’s handling tracks.

Finally, the ultimate real-world performance test for every Jaguar comes at the famed Nordschleife layout of the Nürburgring in central Germany. From our highly-advanced facility, cars are sent out on the ‘Enthusiastic Driver Robustness Test’ – a gruelling 8 000 kilometre, 390-lap run around 73 challenging curves that rise and fall 300 m through Germany’s Eifel forests.

It’s said that one 20.8 kilometre high-speed lap of the Nordschleife is the equivalent of 140 kilometres of testing on conventional roads, making this test the equivalent of 80 000 kilometres of driving in just a few weeks.