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As part of maintenance we need to keep the cars in check, which includes monthly driving on the road for X miles depending on the car/model. Please avoid trying to prove this process is obsolete, it is part of the QC process for all cars in the collection. Which might bring us to this post:

Do fast cars need to occasionally be driven fast?

I am not questioning if this is useful or not. Question is, can dynamometers be used to simulate driving for long ranges at various speeds for many hours? If not, are there other solutions you can think of?

Solution might resemble this Cars 3 movie screenshot, where they drive on simulators. Of course in our case, there is no need for giant screen, nor for base that moves around to simulate road curves.

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At the moment this "driving QC" step is done by actually driving the car around for hours on public roads, which increases wear and tear, and risk of accidents. If relevant, collection includes top end luxury and racing cars.

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"Driving" the car on a dyno/rolling road will approximate road driving for the most part and should ensure that the drivetrain gets the roughly the same benefits as a real-world drive and will keep wear and tear on suspension and steering components to a minimum (just as if you were driving straight on flat smooth tarmac for many miles).

Pros:

  • No significant wear/tear on suspension and steering components
  • Assuming the dyno is at the same location as the car is stored or you can transport it there then there is no need for the car to be road-legal to do this (useful for racing cars or for cars that are being stored for an extended period of time)
  • No exposure to environmental factors such as rain, road salt, stone chips etc
  • No exposure to the risk of an accident with another roaduser

Cons/Pitfalls:

  • Expensive - dynos aren't cheap items, either to purchase or operate. If buying your own you're going to need some seriously deep pockets as well as a suitable (and non-trivial) amount of space to dedicate to it. If using a third party's then you have to drive (or otherwise transport) the car(s) to the dyno and pay for the use of the dyno. Which if you were wanting to do for any real length of time is going to get expensive.

  • Airflow - while by no means a deal breaker this is something that has to be considered. Many of the dyno setups I've used struggle to get airflow comparable to what you'd see in the real world for the speeds that the dyno is simulating and this can compromise cooling of the car. It's not uncommon to see heatsoak developing after only a few minutes of use and depending upon the car this could be a problem if the intent was to use it for hours at a time as while you wouldn't be doing quite the same full-load running as a power run for that full period the ability of the car to dissipate heat is going to be seriously compromised without a pretty extensive cooling set up and that could have knock-on effects for various components.

Chassis dynamometers manufacturers (source Wikipedia):

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