FCA innovates again with Safety Center

- Facilities make FCA Latam completely autonomous in the creation and development of vehicles

Fiat Chrysler Automóveis (FCA) starts a new era by opening the Safety Center, its most modern space intended to the vehicle safety in Latin America. Member of the Research & Development Center Giovanni Agnelli, it refers to the missing piece for FCA Latam reaches full autonomy to design a vehicle from beginning to the end.

Established at Fiat Automotive Center, in Betim (Minas Gerais), Safety Center has an area of 7,600 m² and track of 130 meters, with capacity to perform crash test of up to 4 tons at 100 km/h. Simulating a wide range of situations, the physical evidences performed on-site assess the structure of the vehicle, the calibration of airbags and the retention systems of occupants. The initiative is FCA´s one step further in the path to produce cars increasingly connected to the users´safety.

For Marcio Tonani, Product Development director at FCA for Latin America, “Safety Center is an important achievement, which confirms the leadership of the group in the region and contributes to the improvement and greater agility in the development, maintaining the security levels required internationally.” The new space also places the company in a privileged position before the requirements to come in Rota 2030 program.

Self-Sufficiency

With investment of approximately R$ 40 millions (between infrastructure and state-of-the-art equipment and training) added to the efforts of a team composed of 50 professionals, Betim Safety Center was created in less than a year to perform front, back and side crash tests against rigid fences and posts, with international standard tests covering all homologations and tests of non-government independent agencies.

So far, every FCA´s vehicle created in Latin America used laboratories of the group in Europe or in the United States. “With Betim Safety Center, we become more autonomous and reduced the time for development of the cars”, states Silvio Piancastelli, Vehicle Concept manager.

The space is the missing piece so that FCA Latam became completely autonomous in the creation and development of cars. The first model of the group, 100% developed in Latin America, was the New Fiat Uno, designed in 2008 and launched in 2010, and in cases such as Toro, Argo and Cronos marked such evolution. “With the laboratory there is also the complement of engineers´know-how of the LATAM region”, complements Piancastelli.

From the virtual to the physical world

Another important aspect of the new center is that it is interconnected to all development chains of products, from the design phase, passing through the virtual simulations to reach the physical evidences of development and homologation and to the beginning of the production of the new car. 

The support of the virtual reality, for example, makes the development of vehicles gains accuracy and saving with prototypes, since it is produced only a real model after 3D complex analysis. Thus, the physical car goes to the tests with all back-end engineering and maturity acquired in the process, which greatly reduces the quantity of adjustments to be made.

More significant figures:

- 100 thousand Lumens: LED lighting system capacity

- 1940 fps (frames per second): resolution of the five highest-resolution cameras – full HD

- 1000 g: equipment impact resistance (g = acceleration of gravity unit)

- 2000 g: measurement capability of the accelerometers

- 96 evidences per year*

- 72 cars tested per year*

* in 2019