Sunnyside up. (WIP).

"This is the egg," says Michael C. DeLano, senior vice president, Powertrain, Body, and Chassis, Mitsubishi Electric  Automotive America (MEAA; Northville, MI), referring not to some hard-shelled oval object, but to approximately half of an 18,000-[ft.sup.2] building that the company has constructed. The half in question contains an all-weather chassis dynamometer test chamber. This chamber is capable of handling cars or trucks that output up to 350 hp. In terms of the "all-weather" aspect, it permits temperature adjustment from -40 to +122[degrees]C; humidity can be set from 0 to 90%; the wind speed can be adjusted up to 65 mph; and a bank of overhead lamps provide a simulated sun load 100x of what you'd find even in Arizona on a clear day. In order to assure that the required EPA driving patterns (e.g., starting, accelerating, stopping) are consistent from test-to-test, instead of having a person drive the test vehicle in the cell, there is actually a robotic device from the Engine Measurement Div. of Horiba Instruments (Ann Arbor, MI) with "legs" that can maneuver the pedals under PC control and an "arm" that can actually be taught to shift a seven-speed manual transmission.

So what does this have to do with eggs?

DeLano explains that this is the chicken-or-the-egg metaphor: MEAA wants to get engine management system programs from North American vehicle manufacturers, it doesn't have any at present. So it wants to show the industry that it is capable of handling the program. (It should be noted that it does provide engine control systems to other vehicle manufacturers, including Mitsubishi Motors, which, DeLano stresses, is a completely different company than MEAA.)

In other words, the all-weather chassis dyno is the egg, and the hoped-for work is the chicken.

When asked why they simply didn't avail themselves of a third-party for dyno capability, DeLano answers that outsourcing is something that they try not to do at MEAA. "If you outsource something, then the outsourced company learns everything you know," he points out. They'd rather have the knowledge internally, which provides a competitive advantage.

They take this DIY approach all the way to building equipment for their manufacturing operations: starters and alternators in Mason, OH; radios, engine control units, ignition coils in Maysville, KY. The benefit of doing this is superb quality: for example, it produced eight million ignition coils for GM without a fault. Not surprisingly, MEAA racks up quality and supplier awards with an incredible amount of consistency.