Hearing a squeaking or rattling noise coming from your vehicle can be some of the most jarring sounds to a driver's ears.
Ford is attempting to limit and do away with those noises altogether, by using rigorous mobile climate and road simulators in testing its all-new 2017 F-Series Super Duty trucks.
The automaker's road simulators are known as Transportable Environmental Four Posters (TEFP), sitting under each wheel and shaking the vehicle in a portable chamber. The way the TEFP works is it props the F-Series Super Duty truck up on four hydraulically-powered pads, which take inputs from a computer-simulated program. That program enables technicians to rigorously shake each of the truck's wheels, testing for squeaks or rattling noises.
The TEFP testing combined with Ford's mobile climate labs have the company's prototypes dealing with extreme terrains and temperatures, ranging from 20 degrees below zero all the way up to a sweltering 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Mobile climate and road simulators are absolutely key to finding unwanted noises in the early stages of vehicle development," Craig Schmatz, Ford's F-Series Super Duty chief engineer, said in the company's press release statement Thursday. "Extreme climates and terrains are especially known for bringing out squeaks and rattles. Identifying and mitigating these noises long before a vehicle goes into production is one more way Ford is working to deliver great vehicle quality."
Ford estimates that its new Super Duty will have endured upwards of 12 million cumulative miles of testing before ever coming off the production line later this year.
"Ford's approach to testing for squeaks and rattles, both for Super Duty and other vehicle launches, helps the company put customers behind the wheel of vehicles they can enjoy with their ears as much as their eyes and hands," Vy Tran, Ford's North American launch supervisor for squeak and rattle testing, said.
In addition to the full vehicle testing, Ford conducts what it calls component-level testing to additionally help reduce squeaking and rattling noises. Part of that process has the company putting its Super Duty trucks on instrument panels for shake testing on customized stands called Transportable Instrument Panel Sound Testing Evaluation Rigs.
Part of Ford's rigorous testing can be seen in the video below.
