VERF
            The CAL Vehicle Research department was the pioneer in research about automobile control and stability and crash survival. I was a Principal Engineer and, later, promoted to Section Head responsible for the VERF – the acronym for Vehicle Evaluation Research Facility. General Motors brought a nice year-long test project for CAL. During the Corvair days, Chevrolet Product Analysis (PA) people demonstrated the superior maneuverability of the Corvair, compared to the Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant with a test called the Avoidance Maneuver (AM). PA people outlined a short section of a three-lane highway with traffic cones on the GM Proving Grounds test track skid-pad. A row of three traffic lights sat over those lanes. No traffic cones were in the area just in front of the lights. As GM test drivers drove the cars into the course through the center lane; at the moment they entered the “bare” zone, a randomly chosen pair of traffic lights would switch to red. The driver had to steer suddenly into the lane with the green light. All drivers did this repeatedly with each of the three cars. They drove into the course faster on each run until they reached a point where the car could not turn sharply enough to get into the green lane. With any driver, skilled or otherwise, the Corvair could reach a higher speed than the other cars before becoming uncontrollable. That was a good show for the jury. By 1970, the Corvair had already gone out of production but there was another use for the test.
            In Washington, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) asked all car makers to demonstrate what they could do to make a generation of Experimental Safety Vehicles (ESV). At the same time, NHTSA engineers were developing tests to show the superiority of the ESVs on the track and at the crash barrier. One goal was raise the crash test speed for compliance to the FMVSS crash standards. The government hoped to raise it from 30 mph to 40 mph. Some ESVs demonstrated that the dummies could survive a barrier crash at 45 mph. Such a car was ugly with excessive crash-energy absorption padding.  
            Another goal was to demonstrate superior handling in emergencies.  The ESV should be more able to avoid a crash or recover from a loss of control. General Motors wanted to establish their own test procedures as the basis for the ESV track tests. They offered the three-lane Avoidance Maneuver as the metric for high-level handling. However, a test area with enough paved room for three lanes and the three traffic lights was not available everywhere.
            GM contracted with CAL to validate their modified AM test. We reduced the test area to two lanes and omitted the surprise aspect of the last-minute switch of the traffic lights Our simplified test involved a car driven into a 60 foot long lane outlined with small traffic cones set 8 feet apart. As the driver left the initial lane car entered a 120 foot gap with only two large traffic cones. Halfway through the gap we placed two large cones. One was set at the far left edge of an imaginary lane coming the other way, and we put the last cone 12 feet to the right, at the left edge of the entry lane. These cones indicated the opposite lane of roadway into which the car must be driven. Beyond that gap, the original lane continued with the cones now set apart for a 12 foot recovery lane.

            The course simulated the situation where a child might run out from between parked cars at the right side of the first narrow lane. We had already determined that the surprise aspect of the traffic lights was more a test of human reaction time than car performance. In our test, the test driver had to get through the narrow lane, then turn sharply to his left and pass through the pair of big cones in the other lane. Then, in the remaining 60 feet of the gap, he had to bring the car back into the original lane before an imaginary oncoming vehicle hit him. Each driver did this at progressively increasing entry speeds until he could not get through the course without hitting some cones. Each drive made several more runs to determine if it was indeed the best he could do.
            We were experimenting with the experiment. GM wanted a test for emergency handling that could be used anywhere. We had two new GM cars: a new full sized Pontiac sedan and a small Chevrolet Vega coupe. GM also provided a semi-trailer full of replacement tires. We ran this test one week (five days) each month for year when ever we could get the track clear of snow – this was Buffalo, after all. Each day three experienced test drivers were to run the tests. I was the oldest one. The other two were ten years younger in succession. That covered the age variable. Each month we went into the main offices of CAL and selected a random man or woman “off the street”. These were drivers with no experience driving on our VERF. All drove both cars through the course each day. Sure, the new driver, male of female, could not control the cars at high levels as well as the three trained drivers. We were pleased to see that by the fifth day the new driver had leveled off the learning curve and come close to the numbers of CAL test drivers with years of experience.
            This was an experiment in every sense. At first, we told the drivers to set the cruise control at whatever speed they chose to enter the course. No - that was a terrible idea! If the car spun out, the cruise control would go nuts and struggle to smoke the tires.
            OK. Let’s rig up hardware the driver can use to hold throttle steady as the car entered the first lane. Wait a minute – that is far from realistic – in fact it is the opposite of realistic. Certainly any driver genuinely surprised would let up on the gas pedal and go for the brakes. We know that the test speeds were too high to enable a car to stop in 60 feet. OK, why not let the driver let up on the gas anytime before they entered the gap? A speed trap placed at the end of the entry lane would measure the actual entry speed. Yeah, now the test was much easier to run.
            No, some said, now there is a difference in the way the big car with the automatic slows down compared to the small car with a four speed manual transmission. “So what?” we said. That is just another factor benefiting the narrow, small car – which is handicapped without power steering anyway.
            The real purpose of this expensive project was to demonstrate that the spread of emergency handling performance levels reached by the large car and the small one remained the same despite all the variables: experience, age, track temperature, track wear and even health. Yes, health. I recall hating it when it was my turn to drive and I had a bad sinus headache.         
            At the end, General Motors had a easily reproduced test that could be run at many test tracks in the world – validated by the famous CAL independent research facility. 

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