Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Testing, Testing... One, Two, Three


A video included in an article in Hemming's daily newsletter (screen shot above):



The article about Milford fired off a few long-dormant synapses for me.  One of the very first tasks I was assigned when I hired on with Ed's Famous Data Company back in 1985 was to be part of the QA team validating the installation of a new PBX at the proving grounds.  I spent a weekend at Milford verifying everything worked properly and went through most of the buildings where there were phones.  The facility was in a "minimum manning" state, given it was the weekend, but there were still quite a few people there who were quite happy to explain their jobs to visiting firemen, which included a couple of impromptu facility tours.  The video above focuses on safety testing but there's much, much more going on at Milford.  One of the more interesting things I saw were examples of "competitive analysis," whereby GM acquired competing models from various and sundry brands and tore them down to bare bones in the evaluation process.  I remember seeing a brand new BMW 7-series going through corrosion testing... which involved placing deep (and precise!) scratches on various body panels and immersing the car in salt spray for hours and hours... and thinking "what a WASTE!"  I saw ALL sorts of cars at Milford that weekend, ranging from the mundane to the exotic, including quite a few testing mules of new GM products yet to be released to production.

The Milford proving ground is a wondrous place, indeed.

6 comments:

  1. It's quite the place, and the one in Arizona isn't too shabby either... (And MUCH warmer!)

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    1. I read somewhere GM is shutting down the Arizona facility.

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  2. MPG is an a-MAY-zing place. Back when I was still in grad school, I had my first interview with the General (tho I didn't go to work for 'em until many years later). A deer walked by the cafeteria window. Tough duty, that. . .

    Back when I worked for a lowly supplier company, we used to call on GM guys who worked at MPG. One of 'em was a bit of a wild child, whose daddy was a GM exec. One fine spring day, he was bored and didn't feel like sitting at his desk, so he took an experimental 'Vette out on the high-speed oval, and ended up crashing it at 160mph. When he got out of the hospital, he got buried deep in corporate Siberia, and Daddy was the only reason he still had a job. . .

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    1. Great story, Craig. I would have LOVED to get out on some of Milford's roads with TSMP's 'Vette, but you know how it is...

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    2. I've always wondered if that experimental 'Vette (experimental, mind you; all sorts of non-standard, non-production stuff on it) got dragged across his paycheck or not; in those days, that would've been a few years' worth for me. . .

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    3. ... in those days, that would've been a few years' worth for me. . .

      It would STILL be more than a year's worth for me at the current price.

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