Sending a text is nerve-racking enough. Even after countless edits, rereads, and some thoughtful meditation on the nature of non-instant communication, a text will always have inexplicable errors that you only see after having pressed send. It’s a law of IT, similar to the law of reply-all. So can you imagine what it’s like to fire up the production line on a new car?

The only protection against the law of unintended errors is testing. How do you get to Chattanooga assembly? Testing, testing, testing. And that’s the subject of this latest video from Volkswagen.



This is the third instalment in a series of videos designed to let people in on the lengths that VW went to to make an SUV that it hopes will capture the American imagination and market

In the video, vehicle tech Everett Collins and Director of vehicle integration Rainer Santelmann go over what happens to a car when VW is trying to make sure it doesn’t break down like an Alfa.

“With a prototype vehicle a lot of the problems have not happened before,” says Collins so it takes a lot of testing to and of a lot time to identify them and fix them.

One of the defenses against these problems is high mile testing. “We put a lot of miles on the cars in a short amount of time running three shifts of drivers along with data loggers and a full load to see how the vehicle’s going to do at, say, 60,000 miles, 70,000 miles,” says Collins.

It’s all a battle against lemons and with every mile driven, VW asserts its Teutonic chops.