Henry Wright writes of America

Things are going well over here. It has been a warm April and Spring is in the air. We have watched the trees go from sticks to leaves in a few days.

We have been testing in General Motor’s "High Feature Test Facility" or HFTF at Milford, Michigan. This is for the police car we are making for the US, loosely based on the Caprice V8 we sell in Australia. This facility has two large rooms with rollers embedded in the floor that the car is strapped to. The rollers simulate the road including grades so you can simulate driving over a mountain if you want. There is a massive fan and tunnel so that wind can be simulated. The cell is also capable of controlling temperature, pressure and humidity, all while sucking away the car's exhaust. All this requires a lot of power. When it's running, it doubles the power consumption of the building and uses up to 5MW on its own.

We have been doing a lot of our testing at high altitude (3,500m) and cold temperatures, like minus 30C! Entering it is like going into a submarine: there is an airlock and it takes about 10 minutes to get to the right pressure. Sitting in a cold car at minus 30 while all the air is sucked out is quite an experience. I wear all my winter gear and we have some little heaters we put in the cabin to keep it warm.

But it's not all pain. We have the opportunity to drive some of the American cars, including borrowing a V8 powered monster Corvette. And we have had half of Saturday and Sunday off so have been to downtown Detroit. It's almost eerie going down there. The city is not so bad. We found some nice bars and restaurants in Greektown (Google it), and the waterfront and GM Renaissance Center (Ren Cen) (a group of 7 interconnected sky scrapers ...Ed.) complex are nice. But around the city, for about 3-5 miles, it looks like a war zone. Whole suburbs are no longer lit at night as everyone has left. Some houses are burntout. Most have broken windows or have been stripped of copper and metal. There are still nice areas around the lakes and even new estates but Detroit does have this huge sense of the haves and have-nots. We also went down 8 Mile but didn't see any rappers and didn't get shot.

We visited the Henry Ford museum which was really great. It's really a museum of American Industry with some cars as well. They have everything from farm machinery, early steam engines (some two stories high!) and two of the original steam/gas/electric generators from Ford’s Rouge plant (they are huge!). They also have a lot of original cars like the first Mustang ever made, the first Japanese car built in the US (Honda Accord), and the first mass produced V8 ever made. Also the Lincoln that one of the presidents was shot in (still has bullet hole). So that was good.

Last weekend we decided to drive to Niagara Falls through Canada. In the car by 8am, punched in the directions into the TomTom and found out that it would take 5hours each way! (We were thinking 2.5 hours!). We went anyway and it was well worth it. Really a spectacular sight. We had great weather as it had been raining for the past week! We also took a boat ride that took us right into the falls.

For the last week we are in Keystone which is in the mountains near Denver, Colorado. We have a house where we are staying. It's right at the end of the ski season and we thought there would be no snow. But they had one of the biggest dumps of the year when we got here! 12 inches! The car's don’t arrive until Sunday night, so yesterday we did some skiing at Loveland Pass. It was amazing; the best snow I have ever seen. Because it's twice as high as Mt Hotham in Aus (4000m), you get tired really quickly. It wasn't crowded at all and some of the runs were so soft that you would be boarding along with powder snow up to your knees! And the scenery is amazing. After an afternoon of skiing we jumped into the hot tub and had a few beers (cider for me) with snow all around. Just fantastic.

Henry Wright