Even the most ordinary new vehicles undergo a remarkable amount of testing at the hands of fastidious engineers. Take the Nissan Frontier. It’s not exactly pushing technological boundaries, but Nissan still torture tests the pickup’s naturally aspirated 3.8-liter V6 to catch any problems before customers have to deal with them.
As the automaker explained in a recent press release, staff at Nissan’s Decherd Powertrain Assembly Plant in Tennessee regularly pluck engines off the line, strap them to a dyno, and run them until parts glow orange. Test cycles run from four to 300 hours, with the latter equalling the wear and tear of 130,000 miles of driving. Tests are also run at temperature extremes, but the most punishing are runs at maximum rpm under maximum load for 100 hours straight.
“We’ll pull a random engine from the assembly line, run it through our testing procedures and then tear it down,” said Brandon McClain, quality assurance manager at the Decherd plant, in a statement. “We confirm all internal components meet specifications and look for any issues that didn’t appear during the test.”
The tests—which are done to standardized procedures used at other Nissan facilities—have helped uncover manufacturing issues, according to the automaker. Conversely, these tests help confirm that any changes to the manufacturing process won’t negatively impact quality by exposing issues that only become apparent with long-term wear on an engine.
The Decherd plant also has an x-ray facility that can check for issues with newly assembled engines in a less-destructive way. Technicians can examine engines in 1.2-millimeter “slices,” detailed enough to show things like internal cooling channels, as well as the thickness of cylinder walls and blocks. Nissan checks one of about every 100 engines, which works out to multiple samples per day.
The Frontier’s V6 is becoming a rarity in its segment, which has largely shifted to turbo-four engines. The Frontier’s 310 horsepower and 281 pound-feet of torque give it an advantage over the 3.6-liter V6 in the Jeep Gladiator, the only other body-on-frame midsize truck still equipped with this type of engine. The Honda Ridgeline also has V6 power, but its unibody construction limits towing and hauling capability.
