What do you do when your truck dealership is in the center of a highly congested industrial area, making it nearly impossible to get up to highway speeds under load for test drives?

If you’re Premier Truck Group, you invest $600,000 into what it claims is Ontario’s only high-horsepower full-chassis dynamometer. The company held an open house June 21 to showcase its new tool. About 200 customers showed up for demonstrations at Premier’s Mississauga location.

“We can’t road test around here because of the traffic and we don’t have a loaded trailer,” Gary Van Ryswyk told TruckNews.com. “Now we can simulate load conditions.”

The dyno was ordered about a year ago, and a parts warehouse converted into a dyno bay. It’s an electric model that can handle vehicles up to 700 hp. Interest in the dyno has already been high, Van Ryswyk said.

“We get two different requests for dynos. If someone feels they have low horsepower, it’s very easy to check and see if it’s getting full power. And we use it a lot for emissions diagnostics,” he said.

Identifying emissions issues at speed

Often, issues related to the emissions system only reveal themselves at speed and under load, making them difficult to diagnose without the dyno – or at least a fast-moving highway.

“There aren’t even a lot of hills around here. Guys would do their best but it was really ineffective for us,” Van Ryswyk explained.

It takes about an hour to get the truck set up in the dyno bay, where it’s anchored to the floor in three feet of reinforced concrete. That beats having to drive well outside the area to find some open roads, not to mention the logistics of finding a loaded trailer to do tests under load.

Van Ryswyk said it allows the dealership to diagnose and repair trucks much faster than before, and to ensure those repairs solved the issue before returning the truck to the customer.

“With emissions systems, we would check the code, find out what the code is, and do the repair,” said Van Ryswyk. “We had no way to test to see if that really fixed it. Now when we give the truck back to the customer, we’re assured it’s actually fixed.”