When you think about it, modern cars are cheap. It might not seem that way when assessing the amount of metal, plastic, glass and rubber you get for your money, but things look different when taking into account everything else involved in their creation.
Anyone who’s ever been around a car factory will know what colossal structures they are, and the colossal investment needed to build them. That kind of investment can only be justified when they are operating at, or close to, capacity, as a number of high-profile closures in the aftermath of the 2008 banking collapse demonstrated.
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But there’s so much more goes on before cars ever reach the production stage. They have to be designed and engineered for the often-conflicting requirements of more than 100 markets around the world, and that takes armies of people and yet more expensive facilities.
And then they have to be tested, often for hundreds of thousands of miles. A lot of this will be done on test tracks, but the real-world stuff for many companies takes place in some of the world’s most remote and inhospitable areas. A favourite is Death Valley, where we’ve recently been to see the development work on the new Kia Sportage.
Here, all the laboratory and test-track work on engine cooling systems, air conditioning units, vehicle electrics and hot-weather towing can be verified in temperatures which average 45ºC.
"This isn’t about performance testing – it’s about heat," said Lee Foster, Kia’s senior manager for evaluating thermal systems and materials weathering. "We come here for a week and repeat the test three or four times. Death Valley has consistent weather between 40ºC and 50ºC. Our target is 45ºC, and we have a correction factor to try to get it to that. If we encounter a problem the cars will return to the proving ground to be fixed and we’ll come back and do it all again."
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By GlobalDataHis team operates out of a workshop at a former mining town called Beatty. There are carefully choreographed drive programmes lasting five to six hours a day so that the results are repeatable and comparable. Several times there are stops so that the cars can go through a 'heat soak' in which they are left standing in the sun. The cabin temperatures border on the unbearable when you get back in.
The introduction of plug-in hybrids and battery-electric cars, plus features like active aerodynamics, is setting new challenges, but also increasing the engineers' store of information.
"Technology is complicating the tests, but also helping in some ways," said Foster. "We have 10 years of data on previous models and competitors, and we’re now much better than we used to be."
And this is just the hot weather testing for American markets. The cars have already been to the US-Canadian border in winter to see how they cope with extreme low temperatures. More work goes on at the Namyang research and development centre in Korea for Asian markets, and with the Frankfurt engineering teams on European roads for Europe.
But it's necessary, and not just for good scores in reliability and customer satisfaction surveys. Kia offers a seven-year/100,000-mile warranty on all its cars in Europe, and a 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain warranty in the US, and it would prefer customers not to need either.
With that in mind, the US$430m (GBP276m) development costs for the new Sportage are a sound investment. And all the more reason to think that modern cars are cheap.
