Future automotive testing needs

The automotive industry is faced with a number of challenges, where new transportation methods, choice of fuel and engine types will change the way man will handle the need of transportation in the future. Already in the nineties the industry came to the conclusion that extreme cold is the biggest challenge for a vehicle and in that conclusion lies the background to the 15 % yearly growth of the automotive testing industry of Lapland for the last 30 years. Development and testing new products in extreme cold is a much quicker way of finding weaknesses and problems than with heat.

The demand for winter testing possibilities increases continuously due to increased volumes as well as the automotive industry’s need to shorten lead times in the process of model development. The increasing need of cold climate testing in combination with a winter season that becomes shorter year by year has formed a drastically increase in demand for efficient proving ground with stable and controllable climatic conditions. This has led to climate halls being built on a few places in, foremost northern Europe. These halls are all built in a traditional way, using steel and metal sheet which results in size limitation, safety issues with supporting poles in the testing areas and these halls are also extremely expensive to produce which, due to economical reasons, reduces the chances of building halls of sufficient size to perform complete test programs.

Star Lake Holding has together with the Norwegian company Scandihall developed a totally new method for production of indoor climate halls for vehicle testing. The new method, based on using a tent with a pressure above atmospheric pressure, offers a number of advantages compared to the traditional method both technical as well as economical. The method/concept is called “VehiDome”