A Dangerous Job

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 372, 5 June 1928, Page 8

A Dangerous Job

Life of Adventure Trying Out New Models Years ago when the automotive industry was young and production small, manufacturers let the public do considerable testing. But to-day, when millions of dollars, months of time, and an inestimable amount of goodwill are at stake, every part of a new model must be right; down to the last cotter pin. Any reputable motorcar manufacturer would rather lose a fortune in dollars and much costly time during the preparatory period than let anything remotely resembling an error creep into his product. Money and time lavishly spent in preparation and perfection, the prominent manufacturers have found, is economically invested in the long run. And so have arisen, in every manufacturing centre, the exalted class of experimental testers. Many months before the Victory Six was formally presented to the American public by Dodge Brothers, for example, the new model was quietly introduced to an exclusive group of young men whose jobs centre around an aristocratic section of the factory known as “Department 95” or under a more descriptive title of “engineering-experimental.” Department 95 is a high-class finishing school for debutante ideas in Dodge design and construction. It is the function of Department 95 to take an inventor’s main ambition out somewhere and ruin it, if ruination is possible. Forty men, picked and chosen, constitute the staff and half of them have college degrees. They know motorears, from front bumpers to tail lights. And they are fully informed as to all the geographical points in North America which present grave hazards to automobiles. A critical, merciless, brainy and fearless lot they are; for their professional reputations depend upon their being hard to please. Both experimental and actual-pro-duction models of the Victory Six were driven more than 1,000,000 miles in temperatures from 18 degrees below zero to 124 degrees above by the men in Department 95 before the public was admittd into the secret that such a car was to be brought out. Everything that could possibly occur to an automobile was made to occur to the Victory Six by Kiel, the chief, and his 40 testers. A long-distance phone call: “ ’Lo, Kiel. This is Stevenson. Guess that double steel wall construction of the body is O.K. I just got hit by a truck when I was coming around a curve at 50. Went off th© road and turned over three times. Smashed the fenders all to hell, but the body isn’t dented. Broke three fence posts and a telegraph pole. No, I didn’t get a scratch.” On western deserts, the Victory Six was made to perform in the burning sun 200 feet below sea level. Then the same car was driven 14,000 feet into the snow-clad Rockies, all in an attempt by Department 95 to prove that engineers and designers in other divisions of the factory were right—■ or wrong. On the Indianapolis Speedway other testers were tearing around hour after hour and day after day. Not until the Victory Six demonstrated, over and over again, that it would hold nearly 70 miles-an-hour averages for thousand-mile grinds did Department 95 men let up on speed tests and turn to something else. Strangely, perhaps, the occupation of experimental tester does not come under the heading of extra-hazardous employment. With all their speed, the spills are few; and almost never are the hurts severe. Kiel, who often goes out on the road himself, looked surprised that the question of injuries should even be mentioned.

“When a crash comes,” said he, “it generally comes quick. If there’s time to duck under the instrument board, you duck, and trust to luck and an allsteel body. If there’s no time to duck, you try to relax and use your arms to protect your face. Other than minor scratches and bruises, the preliminary experiments on the Victory Six have caused no casualties.” Department 95 men are habitually serious and thoughtful. But they have their fun, and it takes odd angles. Long before the sales department christened the new car “The Victory Six,” the experimental testers invented one of their own. They needed a name to answer the constant questions that a sworn-to-secrecy tester gets from the public as he drives around the nation on his testing work. And so the new* Dodge, to inquirers on the road, was known as the “Scoots.” Sometimes it was a French Scoots, sometimes a German Scoots, occasionally an Italian Scoots.

“We met many a ‘wise-guy,’ ” said Kiel, “who was thoroughly familiar with a Scoots car. Some of ’em had driven Scoots machines in Europe!” It’s a life of hardship in Department 95, but there’s constant interest and action which attracts the highest type of men. From Detroit to Arizona, 2,600 miles, is a five-day cruise for a tester when he’s in no particular hurry; to the Rockies, to the coast, to south and north and west and east they go; in summer and winter; by night and by day. Always thejr seek trouble; if the have no trouble they try to make it. Because of the testers’ hardships and griefs and exceeding pains, the motorist nowadays drives his car in all •weathers and all seasons; confident that the margin of preventable error in construction and design has been reduced to the minimum. And all the American motor-car manufacturers, with enormous capital and valuable goodwill to protect, have equal confidence that their products, having successfully passed the corps of experimental engineers, will perform in accordance with expectations when placed in the hands of the public.