We have a couple of articles this issue on the testing of new vehicles by manufacturers, one focuses on testing for occupant safety and the other on new winter testing facilities in Finland.
As a business we regularly test new vehicles to review them for our sister titles NZ4WD magazine and New Zealand Company Vehicle, we are not looking at the in depth technical performance that the manufacturer might, but more how the vehicle performs and how it will fit with different drivers, and different use cases. We also regularly do comparison tests between two, three or four similar models and it is interesting the diverse viewpoints we get from the group of test drivers, who have a variety of backgrounds, showing just how subjective different peoples perceptions are.
For repairers testing is usually the first part of the repair process – diagnosis – and the last – checking the repair. Whilst modern electronic diagnostic equipment can be a boon, it is not infallible, and certainly can be challenged by the dreaded intermittent fault – that never happens when the client brings the car to your workshop. I spent a number of years as Operations Manager for one of New Zealand’s larger lease companies and we struck a number of these issues with clients complaining of multiple visits to repairers with the same fault still recurring. We would encourage workshops to keep the car overnight, or for several days even (with a loan car for the client), so they could give it more than a short test. We even encouraged the service manager to use it for their daily commute, as often faults occurred only when warm or only soon after the first start. We even occasionally resorted to getting the client to leave the car with us (with a loan car) and one of our team would use it as a daily driver to see if we could witness the issue first-hand. More often than not if you are driving when the issue occurs it provides good clues as to the source of the problem. Not the most orthodox solution but one to consider for those ‘problem child’ vehicles.
