How can any manufacturer make legitimate safety claims without extensive testing to document and prove the efficacy of the product? And all verification programs must include dynamic testing.
Accidents simply do not happen in a slow, progressive manner. They are instantaneous and they are violent. Pulling on a door latch with a porta-power is far less severe than an instantly applied 20-30G’s of force. The same is true for seating, cabinet or equipment retention.
Static weight loads applied to a vehicle roof can verify some information and design, but they simply do not apply the same intense forces seen when a vehicle rolls over at highway speed. In reality, it only makes sense that any testing program employed to verify safety and integrity should entail all five kinds of accepted methods used and accepted by the automotive industry. With that in mind, Horton’s comprehensive programs are built around the following five methods:
- Static load testing as required in KKK and FMVSS specifications
- Hygee crash sled testing to introduce severe dynamic loads to the body and mounting system
- Computer simulation modeling to predict and pretest engineering assumptions
- Direct impact or barrier testing using actual destructive crash impacts
- Rollover testing, the most severe of all impact tests
Ultimately, the goal of any ambulance testing program must be to protect the lives of real people, whether injured or ill patients or the EMT or paramedic who is attending them. Without attempting to measure actual effects on people, testing programs cannot tell us very much in terms of how the vehicle performs relative to the ultimate goal.
Testing runs from the gamut from industry-standard ASE test (left) to rollover protection testing (top right).