The life of a durability tester

You are a test driver. People look impressed when you tell them that, their eyebrows rising up their foreheads as smiles spread across their lips. But you’re not that sort of test driver. People think of Dario Benuzzi, Loris Bicocchi, V12 supercars, Italian hillsides and favourite trattorias for lunch where they know you by name and reserve the best parking spot for you. But you’re not that sort of test driver. 

Nor are you the other sort, one of the scores of automotive engineers who spend their winters refining ESP systems on the frozen lakes of Arjeplog before passing their summers hammering around the handling circuit or the eight-mile high-speed bowl at Nardo. In fact, when people hear exactly what sort of test driver you are, their eyebrows travel back down their foreheads and their smiles go thin. Sometimes they look at you with what you swear is pity. 

Yes, you’re a test driver. But you’re a durability test driver. You belong to an army of modestly paid technicians employed either by car manufacturers themselves, or by proving grounds like MIRA and Millbrook in the UK, Spain’s IDIADA or Nardo in Italy. Your job isn’t to powerslide around handling tracks in next year’s supercars or thunder through 200mph on the bowl. Instead you pull away, come to a halt, crank the steering over and open the sunroof, again and again and again, through the night, through the winter and through the mind-numbing tedium of it all. 

Once upon a time, the results of the work you did would have looped back around to the engineering folk and informed the cars that eventually found their way onto the showroom floor. But so much is simulated and computer modelled these days there are very few surprises. Engineers can predict, for instance, when a hatchback boot will begin to crack at the hinges, so they spec additional material to stop it happening in the first place. 

The nature of your work has evolved over the years. Nowadays when you drive a prototype, the engineering has largely been done. Your job is to repeat those very specific test cycles as exactly as possible so the manufacturer can learn when certain components will begin to wear out. Based on that, they’ll know what warranty claims might be made years from now and stockpile the replacement parts they’ll need. 

Nonetheless, yours is important work. To one extent or another, the car industry relies on people like you. So do buyers. And you get to drive cars long before they go on sale, even before they’ve been unveiled to the press and public. Even now you get a little thrill out of that. 

I hadn’t given a second thought to the men and women who do this sort of work until I was contacted anonymously by a reader who was employed in exactly this role by a European proving ground for almost a decade. He described the work to me in vivid detail. I also spoke to Ti contributor David Twohig, a chief vehicle engineer who has worked alongside durability test drivers for much of his career. 

‘We exist at the base of the vehicle development pyramid,’ says my anonymous correspondent. ‘It is dull, repetitive and often arduous work. The test cycles are designed to mimic the effects of daily usage, compressing five or ten years into a few weeks. Test vehicles will ideally run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to achieve this. 

‘The cycles are very carefully designed – in fact, they’re a closely guarded secret and often protected IP. You can’t just run a car around a bowl for days on end and expect that to wear the thing out. It’s more structured than that. A passenger car cycle might go something like this: turn on the ignition and start the engine, then accelerate up to an ‘urban speed’ for a moment before stopping on an incline to perform a hill start (including a handbrake check or activation of the hill hold assist function). Moving off again you drive over a rough surface and through a series of uphill corners (of varying camber – good for weight transfer through the chassis; if you have a full set of water dummies in the vehicle, it also gets them moving around in the seats). 

‘You enter a downhill section to replicate the uphill inputs but with gravity working in the opposing direction. You come to a stop, then do a reverse hill start. Now pass through one of the pothole areas, the car thumping heavily into the depressions, before stopping at the end of the lap to perform a static lock-to-lock full steering input, just to give the power steering pump a workout. 

‘That’s one lap complete. Now do it twice more. After that, you’ve got a dozen more cycles to work through before your shift is over. Another cycle might include some faster work on the bowl. You’ll accelerate to 100mph, hold it there for a few laps, dab the brakes, accelerate again and then execute a full emergency stop. You might end this cycle by parking the nose of the vehicle in an enclosed space, so the heat from the engine is contained around it. This replicates a car going from sitting at full speed to being parked in a garage, testing the performance of the cooling system.  

‘I’ve tested around 1000 different vehicles, not all of them cars. The worst jobs involve open-cockpit machinery, like farm equipment, in the middle of winter, or lapping a cobbled circuit on a street sweeper that doesn’t have a suspended seat. That sort of thing will weed out people who aren’t up to the job. 

‘You have to be a certain type of person. Anyone expecting to just blast around in new cars all day would very quickly be filtered out at the driver selection stage. It takes discipline, spatial awareness and an ability to multi-task and work alone, plus good vehicle control. You also have to be comfortable operating a wide range of data logging equipment and happy driving a car with reduced visibility because of the fabric camouflage covering part of the windscreen and windows.’ 

Twohig says it’s an essential part of the car development process. ‘There’s no way around it,’ he tells me. ‘To my knowledge no serious OEM goes without it. If the durability testers are employed by a manufacturer, they’ll typically be the same people who do cold and hot weather testing, plus high altitude testing. It’s not glamorous work but it is important.’ 

It can be a punishing way to earn a living. Performing high-speed kerb strikes, rattling over cobbled roads or gravel tracks and driving in extreme weather conditions, all the while receiving your commands via a digital display that’s right in your line of sight, or via audio instructions through a headset, and repeating the same cycles over and over, would take it out of anybody. It’s sometimes dangerous, too. 

Not all heroes wear capes. And not all test drivers wear tailored polo shirts.