A friend of ours just came back from Arizona and had seen an open transport with an Escalade, Lucerne, and G6's with manufacturer's plates.

He stated that they all had dual exhaust in the shape of a "trumpet" that extended inches past the rear bumper, and had four small "hydraulic style" hoses/pipes exiting from under the driver's side rear doors in various colors (some with caps on the end of them, some not).

Sadly, he didn't have a camera to take a picture of them.

My thoughts pointed to simply being test units for hot weather testing at the proving grounds, but the side quad hydraulic pipes sounded interesting. He also mentioned they were very dusty (Arizona).

If they were something extremely special, I'd have to believe they would have been on a covered transport, tucked away from prying eyes.

Any ideas on what these test units are for?

 

Could they be some kind of emissions testing vehicles?

 

The pipes are drains for switching out different fuels. The "trumpet" is for emissions testing.

 

That's all standard test equipment.

 

Standard emissions testing equipment. The smaller grouping of tubes that he saw leaving the side of the vehicle are actually tied to the exhaust system at various points. They are used to measure the emissions up and downstream of the catalytic converter(s). The trumpet shaped rear tail pipes make it easy to hook up the hoses that collect the tail pipe exhaust for analysis.

 

I stand corrected. I was thinking of something else I guess.

 

You are probably thinking of the drains that show up at the rear of the car sometimes. Many of the emissions testing cars do include tank drains, which show up at the rear of the car, usually with a red cap on them. They allow for a quicker way to drain a tank, as there are some tests and calibration work that must be done with different fuel types in the car (summer vs. winter fuel and so forth).

 

Thank you, all, for the insight.

Is this type of testing done for every model year?

I'm wondering why the current model year's product would be getting this testing now.

 

It's likely that those cars, while current production vehicles, had 2009+ MY engines (or engine software/cal) under development. Even if the engine itself isn't changing, there are always smaller changes to the software/cal for continuous improvement, new emissions levels to be met, new diagnostics regulations, and so forth.

For example, that Escalade might have a 2009 or 2010 spec 6.2L. It might be changing to the next stricter level of emissions compliance, or getting new diagnostics software, or the engine is getting cal changes to bump hp to something higher, or...

Or, it could have a completely different engine that isn't out yet, but they are using the existing body because they can. I once drove around in a current body style Grand Prix that had the 3.5L V6, which was about to become the base engine in the Impala. The Grand Prix was soldiering on with the 3800, but the redesigned Impala was going away from the 3.4/3.8 to the 3.5/3.9/5.3 lineup.

You never know for sure without looking under the hood. Heck, for a while, they were using Tahoe bodies that had been modified and adapted to fit on top of the lambda platform when doing lambda powertrain development work. If you looked closely, you could see that the wheelbase was just a bit off, but otherwise it was hard to tell without looking inside and seeing the cobbled interior and underhood area.

 

Thanks again, Joe!

Good info to know!