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Ford’s innovative spill test protects your car’s shifter from potential damage
We live in a drive-through society. A recent survey conducted by Kelley Blue Book and Taco Bell found that 60 percent of those surveyed eat or allow someone else to eat in their car. The disturbing news is that those stains from spilled food could lower the resale value as much as a worn paint job or poorly running engine.
Kelley Blue Book says the condition of the interior accounts for 30 percent to 35 percent of a car’s resale value. Worse yet, spilling your soft drink can actually cause damage to your car.
Todd Spaulding, a transmission and driveline engineering technical expert for Ford Motor Company, has been conducting spill tests for several years on all Ford Motor Company products to ensure that your errant soft drink doesn’t bring ruin to your car.
“It’s sort of an interesting problem,” says Spaulding. “Cup holders have become the norm in today’s vehicles, and as we move to more vehicles with console-mounted shifters, we’re seeing things come together in bad ways.”
Sticky liquids like fruit juice or soda can collect on the sliders — those small pieces of plastic that move as you shift from park to drive — making it harder to shift or potentially jamming the shifter altogether.
Many shifters contain electronics that liquid spills can damage. Some of the electronics are as simple as small bulbs lighting the “PRNDL.” More sophisticated designs use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the gate. The LEDs are mounted to a circuit board that could short out and freeze the shifter in park.
“Think of it this way,” says Spaulding. “If you dumped a whole cup of cola in your stereo, it would stop working, too.”
To address the issues, Spaulding and his team have developed a sophisticated test to make sure all Ford’s shifters can survive a dousing from your supersized diet cola.
Spaulding says the test in the past required an engineer to just “throw a cup of soda on the shifter.” Today’s test is a bit more sophisticated and, most important, repeatable and closer to what happens in the real world.
A fixture suspends a large cup in a small frame supported at 45 degrees over the shifter. Spaulding fills the cup with 12 ounces of soda (the equivalent of one can), pulls a trigger, and the cup drops and sends fluid all over the shifter.
“It’s pretty severe how much soda hits the shifter,” Spaulding says.
The test is repeated 12 times, using a different shifter each time to make sure the design is capable. The tests have driven design changes into the current products to help route the fluid away from the shifter.
“It’s really not anything too dramatic or exciting,” says Spaulding. “It’s similar to the gutters on your house.”
What’s equally as interesting as testing the shifters is the experimenting they went through to determine what they use to test the shifters.
“We found out that cola was the worst thing we could use,” says Spaulding.
They tried all kinds of liquids and different brands of soda. Spaulding was sure that the lime-green, syrupy sodas with their high sugar content would be the worst. But when the researchers poured it on the shifter, it just beaded up like water on a freshly waxed car hood.
“Cola doesn’t do that,” says Spaulding. “It thins out and runs into all the nooks and crannies.”
We live in a drive-through society. A recent survey conducted by Kelley Blue Book and Taco Bell found that 60 percent of those surveyed eat or allow someone else to eat in their car. The disturbing news is that those stains from spilled food could lower the resale value as much as a worn paint job or poorly running engine.
Kelley Blue Book says the condition of the interior accounts for 30 percent to 35 percent of a car’s resale value. Worse yet, spilling your soft drink can actually cause damage to your car.
Todd Spaulding, a transmission and driveline engineering technical expert for Ford Motor Company, has been conducting spill tests for several years on all Ford Motor Company products to ensure that your errant soft drink doesn’t bring ruin to your car.
“It’s sort of an interesting problem,” says Spaulding. “Cup holders have become the norm in today’s vehicles, and as we move to more vehicles with console-mounted shifters, we’re seeing things come together in bad ways.”
Sticky liquids like fruit juice or soda can collect on the sliders — those small pieces of plastic that move as you shift from park to drive — making it harder to shift or potentially jamming the shifter altogether.
Many shifters contain electronics that liquid spills can damage. Some of the electronics are as simple as small bulbs lighting the “PRNDL.” More sophisticated designs use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the gate. The LEDs are mounted to a circuit board that could short out and freeze the shifter in park.
“Think of it this way,” says Spaulding. “If you dumped a whole cup of cola in your stereo, it would stop working, too.”
To address the issues, Spaulding and his team have developed a sophisticated test to make sure all Ford’s shifters can survive a dousing from your supersized diet cola.
Spaulding says the test in the past required an engineer to just “throw a cup of soda on the shifter.” Today’s test is a bit more sophisticated and, most important, repeatable and closer to what happens in the real world.
A fixture suspends a large cup in a small frame supported at 45 degrees over the shifter. Spaulding fills the cup with 12 ounces of soda (the equivalent of one can), pulls a trigger, and the cup drops and sends fluid all over the shifter.
“It’s pretty severe how much soda hits the shifter,” Spaulding says.
The test is repeated 12 times, using a different shifter each time to make sure the design is capable. The tests have driven design changes into the current products to help route the fluid away from the shifter.
“It’s really not anything too dramatic or exciting,” says Spaulding. “It’s similar to the gutters on your house.”
What’s equally as interesting as testing the shifters is the experimenting they went through to determine what they use to test the shifters.
“We found out that cola was the worst thing we could use,” says Spaulding.
They tried all kinds of liquids and different brands of soda. Spaulding was sure that the lime-green, syrupy sodas with their high sugar content would be the worst. But when the researchers poured it on the shifter, it just beaded up like water on a freshly waxed car hood.
“Cola doesn’t do that,” says Spaulding. “It thins out and runs into all the nooks and crannies.”
