Scania builds itself an 85-hectare truck playground
Scania has spent around SEK 975 million, or roughly A$140 million, building the new proving ground at Södertälje, complete with 17 kilometres of roads, slippery braking surfaces, serious gradients and enough space to teach tomorrow’s trucks how to behave. It is all very serious research and development, of course, although from a driver’s point of view it does look suspiciously like someone has built the ultimate truck playground.
Digital rear-view mirrors are one of the most visible Scania Dynamic changes, designed to improve visibility while also reducing aerodynamic drag.
Key Points:
- A$140 million investment in Scania’s new 85-hectare Södertälje proving ground.
- 17 kilometres of test roads, including 13 km paved and 4 km gravel.
- Built to test electric, autonomous, safety and conventional truck technologies.
- Includes three irrigated braking tracks with different grip surfaces.
- Features gradients of up to 22 per cent and a banked “endless highway” oval.
- Lets Scania conduct more repeatable, real-world testing in-house before new technology reaches customers.
There are probably worse ways to spend SEK 975 million than building 85 hectares of private road where you can drive trucks around all day, deliberately make them lose grip, point them at a 22 per cent hill and occasionally introduce an autonomous vehicle to something unexpected just to see what it does.
That, in rather simplified terms, is what Scania has just opened at Södertälje in Sweden.
Officially it is Scania’s new R&D proving ground and an important addition to the research and development capability of the wider TRATON Group. It has been designed to help engineers develop and validate everything from electric and autonomous trucks through to braking systems, vehicle dynamics, driver-assistance technology and the conventional mechanical bits that still have to work when all the clever electronics have finished having their meeting.
The facility covers around 85 hectares and includes 13 kilometres of paved roads, another four kilometres of gravel roads, 230,000 square metres of paved test areas and 54,000 square metres of gravel surfaces.
Which is a lot of roads to have all to yourself.
Scania truck undergoing testing at Södertälje proving ground
Opening it the sensible way
Scania inaugurated the proving ground on October 19 and, rather refreshingly, resisted the temptation to make the event revolve around a ribbon, a pair of oversized scissors and half a dozen executives trying to work out where to stand for the photograph.
Instead, they put trucks on the track.
A selection of vehicles entered the facility to demonstrate the range of applications and technologies that will eventually be tested there, which seems an entirely reasonable way to open a proving ground. If you had just spent close to a billion Swedish kronor building somewhere specifically for trucks to drive around, it would be slightly odd to celebrate by making everybody stand still.
“The transformation of transport requires us to continuously strengthen the way we develop and validate new technologies. This investment is about building the capabilities we need for the future while ensuring that the solutions we bring to our customers have the safety, quality and performance they expect,” says Christian Levin, President and CEO of TRATON Group and Scania.
The important bit, though, is that Scania can now bring far more of its testing in-house. Some development work that previously required external facilities can now be carried out close to the company’s own engineering operations, where engineers can repeat the same test under exactly the same controlled conditions. That consistency is crucial when you’re trying to work out whether a change to the truck has actually improved something, or whether the road, weather or test conditions have simply moved the goalposts.
If an engineer changes a braking calibration, suspension component or autonomous-driving program, he needs to know whether the truck behaved differently because of the change or because the road was slightly different that day. You cannot learn much from Test A and Test B if somebody quietly changes the question halfway through.
A road designed to be horrible
Some of the most interesting sections of the new proving ground are the bits Scania has deliberately made unpleasant.
There are three irrigated braking tracks with asphalt, concrete and basalt-tile surfaces, giving engineers several different levels of grip to play with. They can also test a vehicle with different friction levels on either side, recreating the sort of situation a truck might encounter when one side is on good asphalt and the other suddenly discovers mud, ice or something equally unhelpful.
The basalt section even includes a curve so engineers can test braking performance while the truck is cornering.
In normal driving, discovering halfway around a bend that one side of your truck has considerably less grip than the other tends to concentrate the mind rather quickly. At Södertälje, somebody deliberately sets the road up that way, wets it down and says, “Righto, have another go.”
That is the peculiar beauty of a proving ground. You create the conditions everybody spends their driving career trying to avoid, then repeat them until you understand exactly what the truck is going to do.
It gives Scania a controlled environment for developing braking performance and active-safety technology without having to wait for nature to provide the appropriate combination of rain, ice and bad luck.
Making the clever stuff prove itself
There are also dedicated areas for testing advanced driver-assistance systems including automatic emergency braking, lane support and blind-spot warning.
These systems are becoming an increasingly important part of modern trucks, and on paper they can sound remarkably impressive. The difficulty is that trucks do not spend their working lives on paper.
They operate in cities with cyclists appearing alongside them, on highways with faded lane markings, around roadworks where the temporary lines seem to have been applied by somebody who had heard a description of a straight line but had never actually seen one, and amongst motorists who occasionally regard a safe following distance as an invitation.
So, Scania can create different scenarios inside the new facility, run a truck through them and then repeat the exercise with increasing levels of complexity.
The same applies to autonomous vehicles. Engineers can begin with relatively simple controlled situations and progressively make life harder for the vehicle as development continues.
That is where a facility like this becomes particularly valuable. Autonomous trucks might eventually become exceptionally good at dealing with predictable environments, but the real world has an irritating habit of introducing things nobody put into the PowerPoint presentation.
The endless highway
Perhaps the most interesting feature is the oval track, because Scania has gone to considerable trouble to make driving around in circles feel as though you are doing something else.
The banking and road geometry have been designed so that, from the driver’s seat, the road effectively feels straight even though the truck is travelling continuously around an oval.
Scania describes it as an endless highway.
Australians who have spent enough time on the Eyre, Barkly or Stuart highways may wonder whether Sweden really needed to spend SEK 975 million recreating the experience when we already have several thousand kilometres of it available free of charge. And if you want durability testing on some of the roughest roads in the world, just take a tour through Victoria.
But seriously, the engineering behind it serves an important purpose because vehicles can be run continuously under controlled conditions without constantly turning around or introducing variables from public traffic.
The proving ground also includes gradients of up to 22 per cent, which opens another useful set of possibilities for testing drivetrains, cooling systems, braking performance and vehicle behaviour under load.
Twenty-two per cent is not the sort of gradient that causes you to wonder whether you should drop half a gear. It is the sort that makes you look at the hill, look at the truck, and quietly reconsider some of the decisions that brought you to this point.
For engineers, however, that is precisely what makes it useful.
Making tomorrow’s trucks work today
Scania says the new facility will support development across electrification, autonomous transport, safety, vehicle dynamics and conventional technologies.
Scania CTO Sara Forsberg made the sensible point that new technology only has value when it performs properly in the real world, and the proving ground gives engineers greater opportunities to test and validate those technologies under demanding conditions.
That probably sums up the importance of the whole project better than most of the corporate language surrounding it.
The transport industry is currently being presented with an extraordinary amount of new technology. Electric powertrains, sophisticated safety systems and autonomous functions are arriving at a rate that would have seemed fairly fanciful not terribly long ago.
But eventually somebody has to put all this stuff into a truck and discover whether it still works when the surface is slippery, the hill becomes ridiculous, the truck is loaded and physics decides it would like to become involved in proceedings.
A proving ground gives engineers somewhere to discover those problems before the customer does.
Scania has also tried to reduce the environmental footprint of building the facility. The company says measures including the use of ECO asphalt and HVO100 renewable diesel for construction transport avoided around 30,900 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions during the project.
So, after spending close to a billion Swedish kronor, Scania now has 85 hectares of roads, gradients, gravel, braking surfaces and configurable traffic scenarios sitting alongside its Södertälje operations.
Officially, it is an advanced research and development facility that will help Scania and the TRATON Group create the next generation of transport solutions.
And unquestionably it is.
But give any truck driver 13 kilometres of private sealed road, four kilometres of gravel, an endless highway, a 22 per cent hill and somebody else paying for the tyres, and I suspect the phrase R&D proving ground might not be the first description that springs to mind.
Scania R&D proving ground – key facts
Location: Södertälje, Sweden
Investment: Approximately SEK 975 million
Size: Approximately 85 hectares
Paved roads: 13 kilometres
Gravel roads: 4 kilometres
Paved test surfaces: 230,000 m²
Gravel surfaces: 54,000 m²
Maximum gradient: 22 per cent
Testing areas: Electrification, autonomous systems, safety, vehicle dynamics and conventional technologies
