Maruti’s test facility to drive global product development

Maruti-Suzuki’s mission of going from ‘Make in India’ to 'Create in India' has got a boost with the coming together of Maruti's test facility in Rohtak, Haryana. The massive 600-acre plot has over 30km of test track and a full-fledged crash test laboratory. These facilities will serve as proving and validation grounds for future Maruti and Suzuki global models as well. 

 

The facility, much of which is already up and running, will be fully operational in 2019. It will help provide end-to-end solutions for new product developments, and when complete, it will have an emissions lab, gearbox lab and advanced ride and handling test centres.

 

The centre, which sees a total investment of Rs 3,800 crore, will help Maruti develop cars from concept all the way to the final validation, with only limited help and consultation from Suzuki in Japan. The validation and R&D centre will help speed up the process overall. Earlier Suzuki had to airlift cars back and forth between Gurgaon and Hamamatsu. What'll make things move even faster is that suppliers can now visit the test track and make changes directly to the test cars themselves. 

 

The high-speed test track bowl consists of a pair of two-kilometre stretches with 35-degree banking on each side. The bowl has a design speed of 190kph, which means you can drive on it without making too many inputs at the wheel until that speed. In addition, there are endurance tracks that consist of paver blocks designed for Indian potholes, gravel tracks, muddy tracks, and low-friction tracks for brake testing and skid pads among others.

 

What has also come on line is Maruti's full-fledged crash test facility. Used to certify the new Vitara Brezza – the first vehicle in India to be certified for offset (AIS 098 at 56kph) and side impact crashes – it also consists of facilities that allow for rear impact and others.

 

The crash test centre, also for the first time in India, has a dedicated pedestrian safety lab. Here, crash tests between the nose of a car and a humanoid leg and head help engineers design cars that do less harm.

 

For this, Maruti uses a purpose-built dummy leg that is split between the lower leg, knee and the upper leg. Packed with more than a dozen sensors, this biofidelic leg (Flex PLI) has glass-fibre bones, rubber skin as well as strain gauges to measure bending movements.

 

The data from these tests will make it easier to design cars that don't permanently cripple pedestrians by preventing the leg from bending back at the knee, normally the point of contact with the bumper.

 

Also measured in a separate test is the force generated by the impact of a human head on the bonnet of the car – the most common cause of pedestrian death. This helps Maruti alter the shape of the bonnet to allow it to absorb the impact better, and changes are also made to the hard bits under the bonnet, that in many cases are what actually do the maximum damage.  

 

The manufacturer currently crashes 35 to 40 units for every new car it produces, but the company aims to reduce this as a correlation between real crash tests and crashes test simulations. Simulated results can currently get only as close as 85 or 90 percent, which is still some way off. 

 

Along with the crash test centre, Maruti has built a dummy calibration laboratory. An essential element in getting factual data from the crash test, each dummy is wired up with several dozens of load sensors and accelerometers, the data co-related with that of the crashed car after the event. As you can imagine, each dummy needs to be re-calibrated after a crash.

 

The benefit of a full-fledged crash test centre can be seen in Maruti's TECT platform used on the Baleno. While much of the work was initially carried out in Japan, having a crash test centre here will clearly help future models. It will help the company engineer its vehicle structures in a manner that it can be optimised for safety as well as better fuel economy and performance. And it will help tell engineers where to use more expensive but lighter and stronger high tensile steel sections. The Baleno, for example, is nearly 90kg lighter than a car of a similar size from Suzuki, and that's a huge amount for a car of this size, that's also been designed to meet a higher safety standard.

 

The biggest advantage of having the massive test facilities, according to C V Raman, ED engineering, however, is that Maruti's 1,400 engineers can immediately see what effect the changes have. In fact, investing in engineers is something Maruti has done consistently over the years. Nearly 35 percent of its R&D engineers have been trained at Suzuki, Japan, for up to two years, working on live projects. And this has allowed Maruti to grow from someone who just manufactures cars to a company that today has the capability to conceptualise, design, engineer, test and validate a product before it goes to the market. The Brezza is proof in point. Suzuki Japan will always play a big role in every project, because, as Raman explains, "Their knowledge base and know-how keep expanding even while we in India are learning, so they always will be a few steps ahead." 

 

But Maruti surely has come a long way from the first few projects it handled locally – the facelift of the Zen in 2003, the co-design of Swift with the global R&D team in 2005, and then the all new body of the new Alto in 2012.

 

Models like the Brezza and the Ignis are already certified to pass the AIS 098 offset crash test requirements, and Maruti has started to certify some of its earlier cars like the S-cross, Ciaz, Baleno and Ertiga to meet norms that will only come into force in October 2019.

 

What’s clear is that this new facility will go a long way in helping Maruti attain its target of 20 new cars by 2020.