[Beav]

I used to see fleets of new cars making their way up I-70 from Denver. They use a mix of interstate and mountain roads for different measurements. Sometimes they're after NVH (noise, vibration, harshness), sometimes performance at altitude, etc. Mostly I recall seeing Audis, VWs and Toyotas heading up the hill.

I used to work for a shop in Florida (West Palm Beach) that rented three of their bays to Ford each winter. They used a particular part of town to take data recordings for NVH. They would transfer the data to Dearborn and it could be reproduced on a hydraulic chassis simulator. They did disguise their cars quite a bit, at the time they would have a Mustang front-end grafted onto a Fairmont, etc.

I forget how many different areas (locales) they used for their data gathering. Just off of east Colfax in Denver/Aurora, Ford used to have an emissions lab. I used to work nearby and we'd run into their techs at the local watering hole on occasion. I believe they closed that lab in 1980.

Here in Louisville I don't see any of the test mules. However the Ford truck plant down the road ocassionally sends a truck over for me to check the alignment readings. I don't know what method they use at the plant, but apparently they're using our machine to verify theirs.