Durability roads contain a variety of surfaces designed to push the limits of vehicle structural integrity.  These surfaces or “events” include inverted chatter bumps, impact bumps, light and heavy vehicle cobblestones, resonance and undulating roads, sine wave roads, and a variety of gravel and cross-country roads.  These surfaces increase the frequency of inputs typically found on public roads for the purpose of accelerated mileage accumulation.  This allows a test of only a few weeks or months duration to represent the total mileage a vehicle would experience in its lifetime.

Included in the durability area is a 20-foot wide by 252-foot long water basin available for accelerated corrosion testing, water intrusion evaluation and brake soaking.  Either pure water or salt water solutions are available.  The drive through depth is 64 inches, although damming can increase the fording limits to 84 inches.

Bosch has the capability to correlate a customer's typical operating environment to a BAPG accelerated structural durability procedure and route through a road profile determination process. Strain gage and acceleration data is gathered over both the road surfaces typically encountered during the vehicle’s life and the BAPG durability events. The data is then analyzed using rainflow techniques. The result is a correlation of accelerated test miles to "real world" miles for the specific components measured.

Bosch also maintains a complete and accurate duplication of the Altoona, Pennsylvania bus route within the structural durability test area.  This area allows bus manufacturers to validate new components or entire vehicles prior to certification at the Altoona facility.