Next Stop: Transportation Research Center

Mary has left the building!

She was shipped earlier this week to the Transportation Research Center in Ohio where she will be inspected by the Safety Tech team. The team is inspecting the entire car to make sure components and subsystems are integrated safely. They will also look to confirm that there are no risks for damaging things like high voltage (HV) cables, coolant lines, etc.

Mary being loaded up for shipping.

Additionally they will inspect the functionality of some safety systems such as our HV ground fault detection, emergency stops (E-stops), charging the HV battery pack and common vehicle functions (horn, lights etc.). Our team will be arriving on site Sunday, and will be able to fix any of the issues the safety inspectors find.

Once we fully pass the inspection we will then be able to move onto the Emission Testing Event where we will set Mary up on a chassis dynamometer — essentially a treadmill for cars. This will allow us to test her different drive cycles and see what kind of tailpipe emissions she produces.

“As a whole, this event allows us to see how well Mary lowers her emissions compared to the stock vehicle” said HEVT team leader Eli White. “It allows us to tweak our control code to change some operating points of components within the vehicle to continue lowering emissions.”

Mary will be returning home to the Ware Lab around March 16th.