With laboratory simulation technology being so advanced today, why does the Xiaomi Pengcheng undergo millions of kilometers of real-road testing?
Simulation and laboratory testing can indeed significantly improve R&D efficiency, but they cannot completely replace real-road testing.
First, real-road testing is a comprehensive combination of multiple factors, including driving conditions, road conditions, traffic situations, and climate environments, which laboratories and test tracks cannot replicate. Laboratories and test tracks can cover standardized and some combined conditions, but they cannot exhaust the infinite combinations of scenarios in the real world. In the real world, continuous long slopes in mountainous areas combined with high-temperature exposure, rough rural roads combined with low-temperature rain and snow, and urban congestion combined with high-altitude sickness can all intertwine to create many long-tail risks.
At the same time, real-road testing ultimately verifies the actual user experience, not cold laboratory data. Passing parameters does not mean a comfortable experience: a laboratory can measure the stiffness data of a chassis, but it cannot measure the physical fatigue a user feels after driving for several hours; a laboratory can measure the cooling power of an air conditioner, but it cannot measure a user's intuitive perception of the dehumidification effect during the plum rain season in the south. Cars are ultimately used by people, and the experience must be human-centric. Only when engineers actually drive the car through various environments can these sensory details be perfectly refined.
Ultimately, there are no shortcuts to creating high-quality products. The basic principle of reliability is ultra-high-intensity validation, over-validation, and a scientifically planned validation system. Our insistence on heavily investing in real-road testing is to identify and solve problems that users may encounter in the future during the R&D phase.