I have so much appreciation for our trusty daily drivers. Starting, running, and getting us to our destinations on these cold days (comfortably with heated seats and steering wheels in some cases).
And man did those weather testers fail back in the early 00s with soft touch plastic that MELTS in Florida's humidity. It's like they didn't even care. Nothing like the dash and console and steering wheel of your 200k+ Ferrari melting onto your hands. I had that problem with BMW E60 buttons. They'd blame it on anything except themselves. And to think how many customers these companies have in places like the hot Arab world, Florida, Hong Kong, or all that oil money in Houston!I can tell you the engineering trips to test and validate all these conditions are generally awful. Several OEMs use International Falls, Sweden, and New Zealand for cold trips. The only thing worse than the cold trips are the hot trips.
As I recall, the coldest cold start condition I had to test back at Hyundai was -40C.
And man did those weather testers fail back in the early 00s with soft touch plastic that MELTS in Florida's humidity. It's like they didn't even care. Nothing like the dash and console and steering wheel of your 200k+ Ferrari melting onto your hands. I had that problem with BMW E60 buttons. They'd blame it on anything except themselves. And to think how many customers these companies have in places like the hot Arab world, Florida, Hong Kong, or all that oil money in Houston!
I can appreciate that, although I question whether soft touch plastics were ever worth a darn to start. I replaced the soft touch stuff on the door grabs of my M4 with something aftermarket because it is still a problem. At least they fixed the buttons.That's partially because most hot/cold trips are focused on powertrain components, and even then, the trips rarely extend past 2 weeks. During development, most programs get 2 pairs of such trips: one to find issues, and one to check that issues have been resolved. Otherwise, you have to use a climate chamber, which is expensive.
Most times when a hot/cold interior durability issue crops up, the company does a cost/benefit analysis and decides if it is worth making the plastics/materials better for everyone at some cost, or just paying to replace the parts for the affected people. It's a brutal calculus, but one that is made over and over again with the car.