As someone who manufactures automotive test equipment, please apply a bit of Occam's razor. A lot of the "shady" stuff they're doing is just reducing and simpli

As someone who manufactures automotive test equipment, please apply a bit of Occam's razor. A lot of the "shady" stuff they're doing is just reducing and simplifying the cost of testing. It would always be nice to run a more accurate, more real-world test. Certain Ford specs, for example, require multi-axis robot arms with independently mobile manikin forms to apply loads to the seats. Old Ford specs, and some current competitor specs, just have a hemispherical indenter that moves through a sinusoidal profile on a straight line at a fixed speed by an electric motor. Hardware for the "realistic" test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus about a man-year of expert engineering time by the test lab or a systems integrator to turn the robot arm into standards-compliant, turn-key test equipment. We're talking high-speed data aquisition, 3D modeling, CNC machining, user studies, and all that fun stuff. Checking that it works correctly requires high-speed cameras, pressure mats, and a lot of work. The old-style test requires bit of steel, a few bearings, an on/off switch, an electrical counter or timer (that even an ME can wire up, and that's saying something!) and an electric motor for cost a few thousand dollars, and can be built by anybody with a welder and a few wrenches, maybe a machinist lathe and old Bridgeport mill if they want to get fancy. You can verify the correct operation with a pair of calipers, a stopwatch, and a gentle kick to make sure the bearings are still tight. Or there are multi-million-dollar sled systems that throw assembled prototype vehicles at barriers to see how they break. I don't even want to get into the complexities of those. And a lot of what you measure there can be tested by chaining sub-components to a hydraulic ram and slowly tearing them apart to see what maximum force they can take. The two systems produce roughly the same test results. In rare cases, there's an effect that the simple system misses that would be caught by the complex one. In my realm, thankfully, it would be difficult and pointless to design it to pass only the simple test. In many cases, it's not about honesty, it's about pragmatism. In this case, the fault lies not with the technology but with the intentional effort that the manufacturer went through to cheat the test.