Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2021 - 16

A TESTING POWERHOUSE
Allison
Transmission's
new Vehicle
Environmental
Test center in
Indianapolis is
open for business
for external
and in-house
customers alike.
by Lindsay Brooke

Each of the VET's enormous test chambers can
accommodate vehicles up to the size
of an articulated city bus.

16 February 2021

" With the VET, development teams don't need to
take a two-week road trip to get three days of testing, "
noted Brad Stamper, customer program manager at
Allison Transmission. " We can get any environment we
want here. Our goal is 'road replication': Instead of
taking five different trucks in five configurations on a
test trip somewhere, we can use one truck, simulate
the different configurations, and get it all done in a
week. We bring a laboratory environment into the various development stages. "

A new business model
When Allison Transmission began planning the VET
in 2018, the company spent a lot of time benchmarking, both with its internal product-development
teams and by visiting OEM and third-party test sites.
In terms of overall capabilities, the VET's closest
North American competitor is PACCAR's test facility
on the West Coast, but its focus is exclusively internal. " We view them as a potential customer, " Stamper
said. " When they get into capacity constraints, we
want to partner with them. We're looking for those
relationships with our OEMs and our competitors as
well, where it makes sense. "
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING

ALLISON TRANSMISSION

educing product development time is among the industry's
top priorities, particularly as vehicle makers transition into
an electrified future. Waiting on the environment - climate,
weather, terrain and the logistics of on-road testing - is a
costly impediment when the program clock is ticking. For commercial-vehicle OEMs, the need for a comprehensive testing facility that
offers complete seasonal independence and utmost process efficiency has been growing. The solution now is in service at Allison
Transmission's new Vehicle Environment Test center in Indianapolis.
The 60,000-ft2 VET, as it's known, is part of Allison's $400 million
investment in engineering resources and new products this decade,
including a new 95,000-ft2 Innovation Center also based on the Indy
headquarters campus. The VET is unique among U.S. Midwestern
vehicle test facilities (and rare in North America) in having what
some customers have called " an ideal combination " : two chassisdynamometer-equipped environmental chambers capable of generating temperature extremes of between -54 degrees and +125 degrees F; full simulation of altitudes up to 18,000 ft (5,486 m) and
duty cycles that are vital for regulatory compliance; on-board diagnostic (OBD) development; and vehicle performance optimization.
The CFR 1066-compliant (Code of Federal Regulations, the required
test procedures for measuring exhaust, evaporative, and refueling emissions) test cells can conduct performance, emissions and fuel-consumption testing of alt-fuel, hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs) and is planning
to add hydrogen fueling and fuel-cell vehicle (FCV) capabilities.

Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - February 2021