So everyone remembers the videos ford had on their website for a while, when the new 6.7 came out with mike rowe and the trucks they were testing, how the trucks had the black blankets on them. What happens to these trucks when there done testing?

 

They get crushed.

 

curious what kind of shape they are in when they get crushed. and what kind of mileage a test truck might see in its lifetime.

 

Some are in fairly decent shape, some are completely used up. It depends what they were used for.

For example, when I was a transmission engineer I had three trucks assigned for my use. Usually they each had about 10,000 miles when I was finished with them. They were in decent shape. They got crushed.

Other groups ran durability testing. These trucks ran 24/7. They ran any type of surface someone might drive their trucks on. Pavement, dirt, salt spray, simulated broken roads, frame flex roads, over curbs at speed, and my favorite durability road.

My favorite was a dirt road that Ford found out in the desert near the test track. They instrumented a vehicle to measure all the bumps on this road. It was something like 10 miles long. They then produced a concrete version of this road in the test track so that the bumps stay constant. And they removed all of the smooth sections. So the 10 miles bumpy road was shortened to about a quarter mile of pure bumps.

I rode with a durability driver to see what it was like. It has to be run without wearing seatbelts because the bumps bounce a person down into the seat enough that the belts had tightened to where they wouldn't release. Before the no seatbelt policy some drivers had to cut the belts to get out!

They have a large sign at the end that displays the vehicle speed as measured by radar. The truck is bouncing so badly that the drivers couldn't read the speedometer! I verified that. I could see the dash, but not focus on the numbers. I could read the sign.

The trucks that ran durability were totally used up at the end. They were not fit to be sold for anything other than scrap.

But the real reason that test vehicles are destroyed when they are done is liability. If they were sold and someone was hurt in one years later it would come back to Ford to prove that they didn't do something to the vehicle when it was used for testing that modified it to where it caused an injury. All the automakers scrap their test vehicles when they are finished because of this.

It wasn't always this way. In 1974 I bought a 1973 Mercury Montego GT from Ford. It had a 351 CJ and a toploader 4 speed. My father was a manual transmission engineer and this was one of his test cars. It had about 20k miles as I remember it.