: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
During the early days of the automobile, new cars were tested out on the open, public roads of the United States. As the technology grew more sophisticated and proprietary, car companies, beginning with GM in 1924, began to build vehicular test tracks that allowed them to privately assess the workability of new cars and features.
Often stretching for miles through rural areas, the proving grounds are easily visible in satellite and aerial photographs, even though at ground level, they look like standard roads. These labs for automotive tech are the connection between the drawing board and the car lot, which is why they are often shrouded in (trade) secrecy and guarded like national treasures.
Left:
Milford General Motors
This first true proving ground was built in 1924 in rural Michigan outside Milford about halfway between Detroit and Flint. Its distinctive circular track measures about 4½ miles around and the whole site covers more than 4,000 acres. Each year, test cars burn more than 2.5 million gallons of gasoline while driving more than 15 million miles.
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
Built on the site of the old Dearborn Airport, Ford's original proving ground helped spawn the 1964 Ford Mustang. Now it's getting a major tech upgrade. A couple of years ago, Ford poured $43 million into the site to essentially allow it to recreate every driving condition in the world.
Whereas the other tracks in this gallery are rural, the Ford proving grounds are built in the middle of this Detroit suburb.
There's even a road-condition simulator they call "World Roads" that allows GM engineers to create "varying types of extreme road conditions found anywhere from Belgium to California to Michigan."
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
Since opening in 1952, the Chelsea proving grounds have added a massive oval with 2¼ mile straightaways, a skid traction facility and 750,000 square feet of buildings.
Near Ann Arbor, Michigan, the test track has been a part of automotive history as well. Back in 1969, Buddy Baker drove a Dodge Charger Daytona stockcar 203 miles per hour, becoming the first person to have broken 200 on a closed course. Later, the Dodge Ram SRT-10 broke the record for fastest pickup truck.
With its tracks in near-continuous use, the Chelsea Proving Grounds end up using about 900,000 gallons of gas a year.
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
Ford's other Michigan testing facility is located about 35 miles north of the Motor City and sits on more than 3,500 acres. The site plays host to the engineering competition known as Formula SAE, in which students design and build a small-scale Formula 1 vehicle and race against competitors from across the world.
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
More recent test tracks have clustered in the Arizona desert where land was once cheap and plentiful. The area had two other advantages: The extreme heat allowed for excellent heat testing of the cars and there was no one around to spy on the companies' operations.
A couple of years ago, however, as development stretching out of Phoenix drove up land prices, GM sold of a large part of its Mesa testing site for more than $300 million.
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
In 2005, reporters were allowed a rare peek into the DaimlerChrysler proving ground. One observer described how the track featured streets that had been designed to simulate a variety of driving conditions like, "reinforced potholes, uneven pavement, broken pavement, simulated washboard, cobblestone." Then, interestingly, he noted that the track had "several roads that were built to specifically simulate actual streets in Detroit and Stuttgart."
Then, in 2006, in what was then the largest Arizona real-estate deal in history, DaimlerChrysler sold its 5,485-acre proving ground to Toll Brothers, one of the nation's largest builders with revenues topping $4.5 billion. They plan to build 16,000 new homes on the site. Coincidentally, the developers could end up building new roads that still mimic the streets from real cities like Detroit, or more likely, Los Angeles.
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
After the Wittmann and Mesa sales in 2006, the housing crisis cooled real-estate prices across the nation, even in high-growth areas like Arizona. Car companies that didn't cash in on the preceding bonanza are now focusing on putting money into their testing facilities.
Nissan, for one, is investing more money into its 3,000-acre Maricopa desert proving ground that already features mile-and-a-half straightaways along its oval track. The biggest problem for the company now is that new neighbors are beginning to move in, cutting down on the privacy the facility once enjoyed. Nissan is considering erecting barriers to keep prying eyes away from their latest innovations.
: Photo courtesy the Center for Land Use Interpretation
Volvo is another company that spurned the proving-ground-selling sweepstakes. They have not only kept their facility intact, but decided to add $25 million worth of new testing areas, including new wet- and dry-asphalt pads and a mechanical garage.
Still, the encroaching development from the nearby town of Surprise is a problem. Volvo is working with a developer that owns property adjacent to the site to build dirt berms and brick walls to block views into the site and (supposedly) to keep noise complaints down.
You can also check out this gallery of pictures from inside the fences, and see a snapshot of a hilarious Volvo mailbox shot by flickr user oybay.
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