00:00Originally, the wind tunnel was built in 2002 for $37 million.
00:08We're upgrading the tunnel, and this was a $29.5 million upgrade, and that upgrade represented
00:16the ability to take us to, again, a state-of-the-art moving ground balance system.
00:24We left the air path as it was.
00:26It was already a really great state-of-the-art air path, but we upgraded the balance and
00:31the ground simulation.
00:32So, we now have full moving ground, five-belt system, so there's a belt under each wheel
00:37and tire.
00:38There's also an 8.5-meter by 1.1-meter center belt that is underneath the vehicle, and that
00:45provides us a really, really great simulation of the real-world ground moving.
00:51This facility was essentially originally constructed to be able to attack fuel economy
00:57and high-performance vehicle stability and control, and this new upgrade just allows
01:01us to do all of those things just a little bit better than we could prior to the upgrade.
01:07But given the importance of aerodynamic drag to hybrid and electric vehicles, this was
01:13huge for us.
01:14And aero's really important for hybrid and electric vehicles because better aero means
01:19less energy to accelerate, and there's more energy available to harvest in a deceleration
01:25or a regen.
01:26And that's the reason why aero is most important vehicle attribute to a range of hybrid and
01:30electric vehicles.
01:32And since we can now measure the aerodynamic drag associated with the wheels and tires
01:37and the ground moving, it allows us to get a much more accurate solution, but also allow
01:43us to optimize those features that we previously couldn't measure.
01:47And that could be as much as 10% of the total vehicle aerodynamic drag we can now optimize.
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