How Good Are American Cars?

JOHN R. BOND

AMERICAN cars are highly prized, greatly respected throughout Europe, where competition is extremely keen. Our cars cost anywhere from 50 to 150 percent more there than at home because of duties and discriminatory levies, yet 144,510 American passenger cars were exported in 1963.

Why are our cars so popular overseas? Because they run and run and run. Our engines use little oil and ordinarily need no major repairs for at least 50,000 miles, usually much more. The chassis components stand up better than overseas products on bad roads. The bodies do not rattle or corrode. A well-used American car with 100,000 miles on the odometer will still bring a fantastic price — in other lands.

Durability and reliability are taken for granted by the American consumer. This circumstance explains why, with the single exception of the Volkswagen, the American public has become so disenchanted with the small imported car. Many of the latter proved to be economical on fuel, but not so economical when repair charges and depreciation were added up at the end of two or three years.

Today every American car manufacturer has a large engineering department and extensive acreage devoted to proving grounds. The auto companies have found, sometimes through sad experience, that it is cheaper to test a new design exhaustively than to produce a relatively untried model and face expensive service problems or corrections in the field.

A combined total of a million miles or more of testing is virtually standard procedure before any new model is introduced. A typical example is Rambler’s all-new six-cylinder engine, announced in mid-1964. One test car with the new engine racked up 107,000 miles with no major attention except routine maintenance. At that mileage the oil consumption was still less than one quart per thousand miles.

An interesting sidelight of this particular Rambler test was that the company used off-duty Chicago policemen tor drivers. American Motors’ engineers stated that their regular test drivers notice incipient malfunctions and report them for correction. Policemen drive like most ordinary people and keep going till the car quits. In all, AMC built ten experimental test engines (very expensive) and logged 2 million miles on these and pilot production-line samples.

rests were run also at such diverse places as Phoenix, Arizona, and Bemidji, Minnesota. More than 15,000 hours were logged on dynamometer testing in Kenosha and Detroit.

Such thorough procedures as those described for AMC’s Rambler “232” engine are not at all unusual; they are typical throughout the American automotive industry. Equally important, such testing is not confined to the power plant.

The seats in a five-year-old car, for example, do not fall to pieces as they did before the war. Why not? Every major auto manufacturer in the United States has an extensive testing laboratory, filled with strange and weird-looking machines. Seats are tested by a machine which forces a wooden model of a derriere into the cushion a given distance, then releases it. The process is repeated every three seconds and continues for a million cycles (if nothing fails). Spring sag, spring breakage, and upholstery durability are evaluated accurately.

These laboratories perform several functions. Their first and most obvious duty is to test newly designed components for function and durability before production commences. A second duty is to lest items submitted by outside suppliers. A simple stoplight switch is a good example. Samples submitted for approval must pass a test of one million cycles without failure. Once a supplier is selected he must expect further checks on the quality ol his product; such tests as are required are a continuous process on a spot-check basis. It is not unusual for an entire shipment from a supplier to be turned down because half of a batch of twenty samples failed prematurely.

Laboratory tests are of course an important adjunct to the normal road-test program. A shock absorber that will stand up for 500,000 cycles within a week in the laboratory will probably outlast the car in normal use. Engineers call this accelerated testing, and talk of correlation between lab and road tests. Testing procedures are developed so that a week in the laboratory is equivalent to five years or more on the road. This saves time and money — especially important in an industry which has new models almost every year.

No part of the car is too small or too insignificant to escape the laboratory. The outside rearview mirror is a good case in point, and here is a brief outline of the procedure used by the Ford Motor Company.

Sample mirrors are given a ninety-six-hour saltspray bath to test for plating quality. Other samples get a sixteen-hour corrosion-abrasive test, considered even more severe than the salt bath. Qualification details are spelled out in specification sheets, even to the amount of porosity permitted in the die-cast mounting and the quality of the mirror glass. (“First surface” type of glass is specified, the best on the market, in order to avoid a double image.) Sample mirrors are also installed on test cars which run on a very rough proving grounds circuit for 40,000 miles, deemed equivalent to 100.000 miles on ordinary roads.

Other sample mirrors get an interesting lab test of the ball joint used for the adjustment feature. This joint must not stick or freeze, yet it must also retain its ability to stay put if the car owner wants to make an adjustment. Mirrors are cycled in the lab by a series of special machines which oscillate the mirror back and forth and in two different directions. At intervals during the cycling the temperature is lowered to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, raised to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. After 3500 gyrations the ball joint must still have 70 percent of its original frictional characteristics to pass. As a result of these tests over the years, Ford specifies a special lubricant for the ball joint, which eliminates sticking yet inhibits wear during the cycling test. The testers have also found that stainless steel (rustproof) mounting screws are essential. After preproduction mirrors are approved, samples from every batch supplied by the vendor are checked on a regular schedule to ensure maintenance of quality control.

THE Delco “Delcotron” alternator adopted by GM cars in 1964 is an excellent example of thorough testing. Delco, as a large supplier for GM, has its own test laboratory. Before this new alternator was ever placed in production, Delco engineers tested various samples and designs for the equivalent of 70 million miles. Other tests included 2.2 million miles on the dynamometer and 25 million actual miles on the road — all this from a supplier. The auto manufacturer has his own additional qualification tests before acceptance.

Some tests are more dramatic than others. At Chrysler the writer watched brake hoses on test. These are the vital connecting links between the hollow steel brake lines and the bouncing wheels of your car; failure of only one of the four flexible lines would mean that you had no brakes. A battery of machines actually whips them to tatters, and this test runs twenty-four hours a day.

A few years ago Pontiac introduced a car with a curved or bent drive shaft connecting the engine and the rear wheels. One of the tests involved a laboratory duplicate of the backbone-like chassis: engine in front, the drive shaft inside its backbonelike tunnel cover and the complete rear axle assembly. A dynamometer replaced each rear wheel. Automatic controls actuated the engine’s throttle, and once every thirty seconds the “car” started up from a standstill, raced up to 80 mph at full throttle, then came to a full stop. The curved drive shaft had to take this enormous strain without failure for 100,000 miles. Before the design and material specifications were finally settled, nearly 100 different shafts were tested. Needless to say, Pontiac Tempest’s unique curved drive shaft gave absolutely no trouble in service.

In 1938 Chevrolet had 13,000 square feet devoted to lab tests; today it has over 100,000 square feet for this purpose, located at the GM Tech Center just outside Detroit.

Chevrolet has a test fixture for the front suspension which strokes the two wheels to duplicate driving over railroad ties for a distance of 1000 miles. This severe test is computed on the basis of 250,000 cycles of the machine. Another test machine at Chevrolet simulates a loading equivalent to a front-wheel side skid. The suspension must not fail in 500,000 cycles.

Rear suspension systems get similar abuse. When Chevrolet first introduced its coil-spring system, it took a test car down to the racetrack at Darlington, South Carolina. The car was elaborately instrumented. and the driver made several laps at over 120 mph. Then the engineers took the recorded data back to the laboratory and built a special test machine to simulate the stresses and strains imposed on the rear end at the track. Cornering loads equivalent to 625,000 racing miles were duplicated before the rear suspension was approved for production.

Accessories, optional at extra cost, are very popular with car buyers, especially since these accessories are thoroughly engineered by the car manufacturer and built to give long life without the need for attention or repairs.

Automatic transmissions are the most popular extra-cost item: 77.6 percent of all cars produced in the United States last year were so equipped. As with engines, these complex assemblies are not redesigned every year. Chevrolet’s Powerglide, for example, has been refined in detail, but it has been fundamentally unchanged since it was first introduced in 1949. But as with engines, a new or revised automatic transmission is thoroughly tested for millions of miles before production commences. The value of this policy was amply demonstrated by the Lincoln division of Ford two years ago. At a newmodel preview, Ford let members of the press drive one of the new Lincolns, then immediately drive a year-old model with over 100,000 test miles on the odometer. There were some differences, but the average driver would not be able to notice them.

Chrysler’s durability test procedure for its optional four-speed manual transmission is interesting, and the company says that it is somewhat more grueling than the requirements of competitors. Chrysler specifies a life test of twenty hours in first gear, twenty-eight hours in second gear, and thirtyfive hours in third, under load. The load is varied for each gear and is equivalent to the strain of running continuously on a hill steep enough to force the engine to operate at wide-open throttle. Years of experience with this accelerated laboratory technique have shown it to be equivalent to over 100,000 miles of driving by the average owner.

Air conditioning is an optional accessory becoming more popular each year. In 1964 some 1.4 million cars left the factory equipped with air conditioning. The industry expects that the demand will rise rapidly; 76 percent of the three luxury cars produced in 1964 had air conditioning, as compared with only 17.89 percent of all cars produced.

The air-conditioning systems are not redesigned every year. The design of component parts is, however, under a continuous process of development, both to improve cooling performance and to reduce costs. A standard performance test is to put a black car out to bake in the sun, windows closed. A test driver then steps in, fires up the engine, turns on the air conditioning, and clocks the time required for the interior to come down to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. One and a half minutes for a drop from 120 degrees to 70 degrees is not unusual.

Another critical test for an air-conditioned car is the performance of its engine-cooling system. The A/C system imposes extra loads on the engine and requires a larger heavy-duty radiator. Also, an engine at idle tends to boil because there is no forward movement of the vehicle to provide a blast of air for engine cooling. For this test most manufacturers specify that on a day when the temperature is 110 degrees, the engine must not boil when idling for at least thirty minutes. For durability of the A/C components, they require 40,000 miles over the rough-road route, equivalent to 100,000 miles of ordinary driving.

Testing includes many other accessories. For instance, jacks are tested, and trailer hitches also get careful consideration. In fact, nearly all cars are available today with special options designed and tested solely for the benefit of those motorists who pull trailers. The companies even test roof racks, which surprisingly enough have in the past given a lot of trouble. The test load for a large roof rack is usually 250 pounds. Among other things, they test with a loose load at 90 mph, then put on the brakes for a crash stop.

Now let us consider some of the criticisms of our cars. It is true that our most popular, so-called standard, cars have grown larger and heavier since the war. This is a simple result of the great American desire to “get ahead.” The mass market for post-war cars has proved to be for something bigger and better than just transportation. And there is nothing wrong with this attitude; if the bulk of sales are in what used to be the Buick-Chrysler category, why blame Chevrolet, Ford, Plymouth, and Dodge for supplying products to meet the demand? These four cars, with weights approaching two tons (unloaded), account for more than half of all sales. All four are big cars in the truest sense of the term, and though gasoline consumption is not nearly so economical as the pre-war standard of twenty miles per gallon, the fact remains that the consumer is willing to pay for more luxury, more performance.

As for the compacts, the figures show conclusively that only one out of five buyers is interested in economy. All these cars weigh under 3000 pounds, and weight is the all-important factor when it comes to economy, whether we are talking about fuel, oil, tires, or even first cost. American compacts are far superior to comparable imports, primarily because they are designed, tested, and built to give genuinely economical transportation. They may not give thirty miles per gallon, but cost-conscious buyers know that the annual fuel bill is not a significant factor in computing the cost of owning an automobile.

Forced obsolescence has been much maligned. When production quantities exceed 350,000 units per year, the tooling is worn out anyway. Hence, the technical innovations evolved each year by engineers can just as well be incorporated when tools, dies, and machines are replaced. While Henry Ford may have saved a dollar or two per Model T (by making no important design changes), he spent over 100 million dollars in 1927 to make the change to the Model A. Yet only 4.5 million Model A’s were produced before complete retooling was required for the 1932 V-8. From that time on, Ford retooled every year for a new and improved model. Even Ford capitulated to the inexorable march of technological advances.

The detractors of the American car like to point out that most major technical innovations come from Europe. This may well be true if one talks of who was first. But it remained for Detroit to produce the soft-riding independent front suspension at a reasonable cost in 1934. It was Reo in Lansing which first offered an automatic transmission in 1933. Duesenberg in Indianapolis pioneered fourwheel hydraulic brakes in 1921. American tire engineers developed the balloon tire in 1924, the extra-low-pressure tire in 1949, the low profile in 1964. Goodyear pioneered the caliper-disk brake on the Crosley in 1949. The supercharger, first used on the Chadwick car in 1908 and later adapted to high altitude flying by GE, helped us to win World War II.

Current European cars often abound in technical or novelty features, but it takes American engineering, design, testing, and manufacturing to make these features practical and available to great numbers of people at a cost they can afford.

An oft-quoted example of European “leadership” is the widespread use of independent rear suspension. In the United States, we have only the Corvette and Corvair with this system of rearspringing.

I have talked with dozens of engineers in and around Detroit on this subject. They all agree that independent rear suspension has some advantages, but they also agree that the ride is not noticeably improved, that erratic handling is difficult to overcome, and that the high manufacturing cost is not justified by the results. The Corvair would not be possible without independent rear suspension because of its rear-mounted engine. The Corvette needs a similar type of suspension in order to get adequate traction with its tremendous power-toweight ratio (up to 425 horsepower, weight only 3200 pounds).

Independent suspension gives a much improved ride on small, light cars, but on 4000-pound American cars the ratio of sprung to unsprung weight, even with solid one-piece rear axle assemblies, is not critical. The latest American development — positioning the rear axle more positively and accurately by means of three or four rubbercushioned links — gives excellent results at low cost. The links are arranged to negate acceleration squat and brake lift; they give good cornering control and freedom from transmission of axle-gear noise.

The typical American car is astutely designed to supply a simple need: comfortable, reliable transportation at a reasonable cost. I regard the modern American car, at well under $1.00 per pound, as one of the best buys in the world today.