Cars don’t reach the consumer market unless they have undergone rigorous tests to ensure quality, durability and dependability. Cars are tested in hot weather, freezing cold and then a battery of lab tests come in to do their job. 2008 Ford F-Series Super Duty truck underwent nearly 10 million miles in testing under all kinds of conditions, including 3 million miles of real-world customer durability testing.

The vehicle undergoes torture tests to confirm that it can stand upto rough treatment that it may receive from consumers, the roads and the weather. Grueling and sometimes innovative tests are performed on nearly everything in the vehicle before it reaches the roads. Here are some of the ‘tortures’ vehicles from Ford, Lincoln and Mercury marques undergo before they are sent to the showrooms.

1) Open-and-Shut Case:

If something in the car opens and closes, it has to prove that it can do it well, and for a long period of time. The doors, the windows, the hatches, all undergo rigorous testing for 4 to 6 weeks, which is equivalent to 10 years of average use. A hydraulic arm opens and closes the doors 84,000 times, the doors are locked/unlocked and the windows rolled up and down 26,000 times. Decklids have to endure 10,000 cycles, the count for liftgates is 25,000 and the hood has to face the music 1,500 times. Even the fuel doors are not spared and they undergo the open/close cycle 3,000 times. During this test, the temperature runs amok and varies from -40 to +180 Fahrenheit.

2) Surviving Silver Creek:

Ford devised this test in 1977 to simulate actual off-road trail in Northern Arizona. A man made surface was constructed at the company’s Arizona Proving Grounds with the intention of capturing the loads and damage for durability testing. A 2,000 feet run on this course is nearly equivalent to 20miles on an off road surface. This section has 15 distinct types of bumps and chuckholes followed by a section of broken concrete pieces in a random matrix.

3) Chuckholes:

Nothing is more annoying than chuckholes for a driver, and they aren’t any good for the vehicle either. To fight wheel and tire damage at the hand of chuckholes, Ford engineers tune shock rebound rates so that the tires glides over the potholes rather than dropping into them. During tests, each wheel faces approximately 2,700 4-inch deep and 30-inch wide square-edge chuckholes.

4) Sand Wash:

This is a test for steering systems and four-wheel-/ all-wheel-drive components. Ford engineers drive the vehicles for two miles in a serpentine formation on an 8-inch deep sand surface. This test is done to ensure that vehicles don’t get stuck when being driven on beaches or on construction sites.

5) Deep Freeze:

Vehicles undergo deep freeze in a bid to ensure that they are capable for surviving the deep thermal shocks in cold weather. A demanding Deep Thermal Shock test is conducted at the company’s Engine Laboratory in Dearborn, Mich. Vehicles have to undergo a -22 Fahrenheit shock for 300 repeated heating to cooling cycles. This test continues for 150 hours or failure, whichever comes first. But that’s not all, at the Automatic Transmission Development Laboratory in Livonia, Mich., vehicle parts are frozen to -60Fahrenheit followed by the application of maximum torsional load.

6) Strangling the Pump:

Conditions may arise when the transmission pump has to face a momentary loss of fluid. This test is designed keeping for such eventualities. Vehicles are put through speed, temperature and pressure matrix while the oil is drained from the pump (choking)! Vehicles are made to endure speeds upto 8000rpm and temperatures in excess of 250 Fahrenheit while their pumps are ‘bled dry’.

7) Wear and Tear for the Clutch Assembly:

Designed to ensure that heat generated by excessive clutch wear would not induce mechanical failure, this test goes pretty rough on the clutch. The key is being more brutal than the worst driver could ever be. A continuous slip is applied to the vehicle’s clutch assembly until all material disintegrates.

8) Curb Testing:

This test simulates an expressway run-off situation. The vehicle faces a curb of entry height of 5-inches and an exit height of 5.5-inches at approximately 10degrees. Approaching curbs at speeds induces high impact loads while the exit induces complete rebound of the suspension.

9) Twist Ditch:

This lab based test simulates traversing a deep-angled ditch. Twist Ditch roughs up the suspension and puts the vehicle in a body twist. Torsion is induced by forcing the suspension to support vehicle weight on two diagonally opposite wheels at any given time. The ‘twist drill’ makes sure that the vehicle is capable of traversing washouts and dry river beds.

10) Soda Proofing:

Sounds funny ... but it’s an important part of testing. Shifting from park to drive may become difficult or the shifter may get jammed owing to fruit juice and soda spills. The sticky liquid can collect on the small pieces of plastic in the slider and give rise to big problems. To keep this situation at bay, a cup filled with 10-ounces of soda is thrown all over the shifter. The process is repeated 12 times to ensure that the shifter is capable and not prone to get jammed easily.

Vehicles undergo tough testing and tough times before they reach the consumer. These brutal tests may give you an insight into the high development costs of new vehicles and the tortures they undergo before being realized for market production. Designing a vehicle is no easy job, it requires intelligence and a pragmatic approach, more so for testing, or rather, ‘torturing’ of the vehicles.