July 17th, 2003 Territory
breaks cover
A
PROTOTYPE of Ford's exciting new Territory was briefly spotted last week
on the beaches of Fraser Island.
The Territory program started four years ago as a
result of market research identifying a need for a vehicle combining the
best attributes of a large 4x4, a family car and a people mover. "There was clearly an unmet consumer need
for a product that suited the urban lifestyle on week days, but could
also facilitate an active outdoor lifestyle on weekends and
holidays," said Product Development vice president Trevor
Worthington. "Customers told us they wanted a product
with the image and utility of a 4x4 but without truck-like handling. In
essence they wanted a vehicle with car-like dynamics of ride, handling
and manoeuverability. "Any successful product must start and
finish with the customer and their wants, and Territory was created in
response to that unmet market need." The prototype pictured at Fraser Island is the
culmination of numerous exhaustive market research clinics, used to
ensure every detail is designed to meet customer expectations of
appearance, function, package and ergonomics. "Once the customer needs were understood,
vehicle level targets were defined and cascaded down into system and
component targets," Worthington said. The first off-tool prototypes rolled off Ford's
Broadmeadows production line earlier this year. They have undergone extensive testing at Ford's
You Yangs Proving Ground as well as real-world testing in places as
diverse as the frozen lakes of Sweden, the Western Australian Pilbara
region, urban roads around Sydney and Melbourne and along the beaches of
Fraser Island in Queensland. The confirmation prototypes will go on to
complete more than 2 million kilometres of testing before Territory goes
into production. Ford engineers have already completed more than 3200
system verification tests, in addition to approximately 9000 component
tests to evaluate Territory's compliance with customer requirements. Prototype testing follows extensive Computer
Aided Engineering (CAE) testing. Territory has already totalled more
than 20 million virtual kilometres in Ford's supercomputers, taking up
more than 2 billion computer Central Processing Unit (CPU) seconds. Ford's CAE team used the supercomputer centre at
Ford headquarters in Dearborn, which uses machines similar to those used
by NASA and the CIA. The Ford supercomputers represent a combined
memory capacity of more than 1.5 million megabytes – or about 6000
state of the art Pentium IV home computers. That processing power has allowed the Territory
CAE team to run more than 1900 virtual crash simulations, each taking
around 12 hours. A home computer would need a year to run the same
simulation, and a mathematician working with pen and paper would require
more than 16 million years. The all-new Ford Territory is expected to go on
sale in 2004.
|
It
was undergoing one of a series of gruelling, real-world validation tests
by experts from Ford's product development and manufacturing
departments. 