The man who kills Kias for a living
Howard Edmond’s job is to push company’s cars to the breaking point
Have you ever wondered how automakers actually test your car before they hand you the keys?
How exactly do they compress a lifetime of abuse into the precious few months they get to test and develop a prototype? How do they manage to simulate the incredible diversity of crappy roads — from a dirt road in rural Quebec to the ancient cobblestones that are still a part of every European city core — the world has to offer?
And perhaps most important of all, who are these test pilot geniuses who can tell a rattle from a squeak while their very insides are being jangled about like Jell-O in a blender? Whose “seat of the pants” dynamometer is so finely attenuated that they can detect the slightest hesitation of a cruise control system — the hardest part of the drivetrain to test according to many experts — with the sensitivity of a piano tuner “stretching” a Steinway.
Well, I don’t know what other automakers do, but one of Kia USA’s secret weapons is Howard Edmond, a 51-year-old Test Driver No. 3 — No. 3 being the highest level the company’s California Proving Ground offers — whose job is to drive around the 4,329-acre facility in the Mojave Desert (right next door to the Edwards Air Force Base) seven hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks (minus holidays) a year.
He drives over bumps. He drives on smooth roads. Some weeks, he drives almost universally in a straight line. Other times, he just goes around in circles. He does it during the day and he does it during the night.
His only job is to tell Kia where it screwed up before you do.
Essentially, Edmond’s job is to compress all the bad things you — and, indeed, all drivers around the world — will do to your car before you even get to drive it. For instance, there’s a section of Kia’s California Proving Ground that is dedicated to bashing your future car over potholes that would put a Northern Ontario back road to shame.
On another, there are cobblestones — Edmond says they’re the most physically demanding part of the test track, especially if you have a bad back — that would do any Belgian proud. In between, there’s a 43-acre skid pad that allows endless fishtailing, a section of track with every type of pavement known to man (to test differing effects on tire noise) and a surprisingly steep 12-per-cent grade that Edmond uses to test cruise-control consistency.
There are speed bumps to bottom the suspension, chatter bumps to rattle your teeth and even a huge 10-kilometre-long high-speed oval — Edmond’s favourite because he can race around at 160 km/h: “Sometimes for 20 minutes at a time,” he says with a just a glint of glee — to break the monotony of the more mundane tasks like endless stop-and-start brake tests.
And monotonous it can be. Indeed, Edmond thinks his greatest talent lies in being able to “test for infinitesimal little improvements” over a track he’s driven for eight hours a day for the last eight years. His specialty — or at least where he feels his feedback is most valuable to Kia’s engineers — is in the suspension department, his posterior particularly “sensitive” as he says.
But everything about a test driver’s job must be attuned to nuanced automobilia, from hands — which must feel minute differences in steering effort and feedback — to feet that must delineate good antilock brake fluctuations from bad.
Nor is that the end of the day. There’s a huge puddle that resembles nothing more that a concrete bathtub that tests the undercarriage’s ability to seal out moisture, an eight-kilometre off-road course to test Kia all-wheel-drive systems and a stretch of pavement with a pronounced 1.5-degree crown in the road to test for that annoying crosswind instability.
And, of course, there’s that great big desert that surrounds the proving grounds just in case Edmond wants to test a Soul’s window seals for dust impermeability.
What’s so interesting about Edmond’s job — he is considered the “consumer” input part of Kia’s testing; the company has engineers to test for components failure and track experts to explore the furthest reaches of cornering — is that it required no other training than “driving every type of machinery, even farm tractors, from the age of 13.” Training, being able to tell the difference between good road holding and squishy front-end plowing is, as they say, “on the job.”
What is most important is safety and the conscientiousness to be able to maintain concentration over what, as Edmond keeps repeating, can be a truly monotonous seven hours. Perhaps Edmond’s second job — he is the pastor for the First Southern Baptist Church of North Edwards — imbues him with a patience most couldn’t muster.
Of course, much of the testing requires no human hands at all. It will come as no surprise that more and more auto development is now computerized. Once limited to the design process, computers can now digitally simulate as Markham, Ont.’s Multimatic does, every corner and curb of a racetrack or, as England’s rFpro claims, digitally map out more than 3,000 kilometres of diverse roadway, suspension testing yet another engineering function about to be robotized.
Even some of the proving grounds’ torture tactics are hands-free. All new exterior components, for instance, must undergo a withering weather test crucified on racks that optimize their exposure to the California sun. Kia even adds vast solar panel-like arrays of mirrors to focus the rays even more intently on the paint chips. Interior components, meanwhile, are placed in “hot boxes” for the full Bridge on the River Kwai treatment.
It’s all part of the goal — conducted on proving grounds from Finland to Dubai (Kia, in fact, has two more in South Korea) — of producing an endurance test that Lev Klyatis, author of Accelerated Reliability and Durability Testing Technology, describes as being 150 times more intense than normal driving.
In other words, Edmond breaks Kias so you won’t.
It will come as no surprise, considering the legal hurdles automakers will have to jump through, that autonomous automobiles — certainly Kia’s versions, at least — will remain extraordinarily cautious when navigating our roads. Our sojourn around the company’s California Proving Ground was a chance to show off their latest self-driving Soul EVs. It proved an impressive, if timid, exhibition.
Our Soul parked itself at the push of a watch-screened button, it changed lanes when approaching stopped vehicles and had no problem flowing smoothly through traffic despite the frenetic lane-changing of other drivers. That said, it did so very cautiously. Every stop sign was a count ’em one-two-three-second exercise in frustration and Kia’s ever-vigilant electronic nanny made sure every manoeuvre was performed in what the average human being would call slow motion.
This, of course, is not Kia’s fault, but simply the vigilance required in teething a new technology.