CleveRA Car: what does an ordinary van hide at first sight?

CleveRA Car: what does an ordinary van hide at first sight?

From the outside, the massive ramp with cameras on the roof may be all that catches the eye. But inside the Mercedes Sprinter, which is now starting its eighth season in the service of the CleveRA VARS team, there is a small science lab. How hard is it to get a car like this on the roads it’s supposed to measure?

The server cabinets, the batteries powering the sensor array and other electronic equipment, the cameras. With this equipment, the CleveRA Car can scan the road beneath it at 80 kilometres per hour to within one millimetre and store the raw data directly. How does the Czech legislation look at such a car? Consultant Zdeněk Drápela knows exactly. The homologation of the unique car required perfect knowledge of the regulations and diplomatic experience on the Czech-Swedish axis.

“CleveRA was used for a long time in a mode where all systems were placed on the car temporarily. This is how the car was legally approved for operation. Over time, however, we were advised that a number of elements should be homologated as a conversion,” says Zdeněk Drápela, describing the motivation for the anabasis that began more than a year ago.

There are several elements on the car that officials believe deserve official registration in the technical licence. How many? That was the first problem. “The main problem was to find out what should be written down at all. The second step was to provide documentation of the individual elements and confirm that they were approved for operation,” says Drápela.

CleveRA Car originated in Sweden, where it was built by diagnostic car specialists Ramboll. And even though Sweden is a member of the European Union, the Nordic papers were not always enough for Czech homologation. “This was the case, for example, with the beacon bar on the roof. We had to prove that it was homologated, even though we knew it was and that Ramboll used it on all the other cars,” says the consultant, who also drives a diagnostic car on Czech roads from time to time.

And he also recalls with a smile the surprise of his Swedish colleagues when he started supplying them with the requirements of Czech officials. “In Ramboll, they answered that if the elements are homologated in Sweden, which is an EU member state, it must also apply in the Czech Republic. But here nobody cared, it was the European homologation labels that were decisive,” says Drápela.

After the paperwork debacle, he had to deal with another snag – although the CleveRA performed well on the emissions test despite its half-million mileage, the technicians didn’t like the higher idling speeds. But that was down to the more powerful alternator. The standard alternator would not have been able to support the operation of the measurement systems. Because of this little issue, CleveRA went to the workshop where it was “reset” to fit within the required rev range.

The whole homologation process focuses, among other things, on safety. The little things that the engineers pointed out are rather funny. “We had to add a cover to the odometer on the wheels so that it didn’t have sharp edges,” says Zdeněk Drápela, describing the covering of the subtle device used to accurately record the distance travelled. Without it, it would be impossible to determine the position of the car with extreme precision. And there was also a discussion on the topic of the “beacon light” in the cab.

The bottom line is that after a year of work and negotiations, the CleveRA Car has become a unique van. Does that make sense for a car that has already covered half a million miles? “Absolutely. The mileage is not extreme, considering that the car runs very smoothly and does not have a heavy load,” explains Zdeněk Drápela. The Ramboll experts feel the same way. They build most of their measuring vehicles on Mercedes Sprinter chassis. And a half-million mileage is nothing out of the ordinary, according to them. And even if it were, in terms of the value of the entire measuring vehicle, the Mercedes Sprinter is only a small item that can be replaced. “To price the insurance, we looked at the actual value of the measuring equipment. If we wanted to equip another car like this today, it would cost around 800,000 euros,” concludes Drápela.