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There is just so much that goes into creating a new vehicle. The level of detail is almost beyond comprehension, in fact. Not only does a car company have to develop engines, styling, interiors, suspensions, and so on, but they have to fine tune all of those components too. Developing a new vehicle is truly a task of monumental proportions.
Last week, a few of your intrepid VehicleVoice correspondents got the chance to spend the day at Chrysler’s test track in Chelsea, Michigan. It’s a giant facility with all kinds of simulated roads and environments so that they can develop new vehicles in secrecy, away from the public’s prying eyes. You can see the layout of the place in this pic:

Chrysler’s proving grounds in Chelsea, MI

Anyways, a bunch of journalists and analysts like ourselves were invited to sample the entire 2009 Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep product lineup at their test track last Thursday. We got to drive everything all over their test tracks that simulated just about every drive environment you could imagine.
One of the tracks we drove on was a big road loop that has a variety of surfaces that simulate different kinds of roads. They use this to tune the suspensions so that the vehicles feel good on all different kinds of road surfaces. You can see some of it here:

The left lane simulates the broken concrete slab freeways like we have in California. The sign says “Tilted Slabs and Various Gaps”
The left lane simulates the broken frost heaved pavement that’s so common in Michigan!
There is also a MASSIVE high speed banked oval that we weren’t allowed to drive on, but you could see engineers doing high speed tests on it all day long. They would literally drive them at top speed; the pics don’t communicate how fast those cars were flying by!
A Chrysler 300 at speed entering the banked turn
Three vehicles whizzing by! We are behind the wheel of a Dodge Ram dually in this pic.
The all-new Dodge Challenger at speed
We’re not allowed tell you details of Chrysler LLC’s 2009 lineup for a few more weeks, but we can definitely tell you that we had a blast sampling them on the same grounds that those engineers meticulously test and tune countless vehicles on. Certainly, the day really put into perspective just how much work goes into creating a vehicle.