New Western Star Vocational Truck to Debut After Extreme Testing

Source: Western Star Press Release:

Western Star will release its all-new vocational truck on September 29, 2020, after being subjected to extreme testing conditions designed by the Product Validation Engineering (PVE) team of Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA). When it arrives, the next Western Star will be the most tested truck in Western Star’s history, the company says.

The structures lab at DTNA houses both full vehicle and cab-only shaker tables to accelerate durability testing and find breakage in the lab years before vehicles get to testing on the road or in the field. Capable of violently manipulating the vehicle on both X- and Y-axes to simulate a lifetime of extreme use in customer hands, the shaker tables can replicate approximately 1 million miles of real-world use in under two months of testing in the lab. For a vocational truck, the validation of the next Western Star’s cab and chassis components started early in the development process and yielded new, internal standards for durability.

For different loading conditions, a ‘bed plate’ test simulated extreme maneuvers on the chassis and specific components to ensure full capability, while a ‘frame twist’ test cycle was repeated 10,000 times to provide a solid foundation for the new truck and make sure it could withstand the rigors of the toughest vocational operating environments regardless of application or body equipment installed.

With a focus on driver safety, the PVE team at DTNA destroyed numerous cabs with multiple cab crushing tests. The pendulum test imparted force to the top corners of the cab while the roof strength test applied extra force to the roof to exhaust its strength. Both tests yielded invaluable test data for the new, lighter cab design to ensure it matched and surpassed the performance of other Western Star trucks. Cab impact tests are conducted while the trucks are equipped with a number of sensors and cameras to collect 200 unique data points.

DTNA’s High Desert Proving Grounds in Madras, Ore., lies 120-miles southeast of DTNA’s Portland headquarters. At an elevation of 2,390-feet and with 10,000-foot tall peaks within a 50-mile radius, the high desert of central Oregon lets engineers test in snow, rain and heat during the summer months.

Expanded in 2017 with an investment of $18.7 million, the 87-acre High Desert Proving Grounds offers a test loop of three and a half miles that allows engineers to simulate and compress a typical vehicle’s full service life into as little as seven months. The tailored road surfaces of the Proving Grounds provide a high fidelity test track for the engineers and technicians. Unique for vocational applications, the logging roads of northwest Canada where Western Star was born were replicated at the track, allowing engineers to test against the same road types traversed by customers in the harshest conditions. This allows the engineers to learn from the responses of the truck, discover issues further in the validation process, and fix them at a 14-bay development facility on-site.

To learn more about this and the complete lineup of Western Star trucks, visit westernstartrucks.com