The formula for developing a vehicle has been pretty much the same since the 1970s. As Chinese automakers have matured, they’ve shifted the equation, introducing artificial intelligence, pushing for rapid engineering evolution and quickly implementing new technologies.
Other country’s automakers have been slow to evolve their development timelines. Some are doing it better than others, including Mercedes-Benz, which has been vocal about its research and development ecosystem redo.
American automakers have begun changing their century-old development pipelines. Among them, General Motors has been a leading the way, employing methods and practices from the Chinese automaker playbook.
The way the company used to develop vehicles was, “a very slow, very expensive process,” Chief Product Officer of General Motors Sterling Anderson told Newsweek.
Over the last few decades, Anderson has seen computational methods and numerical tools change how each function of the vehicle development process occurs.
“Each function had their own specialized virtual development tool that allowed them to start to get away from the heavily empirical kind of prototype-based guess-and-check testing into a more considered virtual development approach, but what was still happening was the baton was effectively being passed between functions,” he said.
And, that baton had to go back and forth, between departments, each time a change was made.
Today, massive transformation is afoot. GM has evolved its process to move quickly, with more agility than in the past. Anderson gave an example: “General Motors is using a tool that allows a designer, when they tweak a surface on one of their models, to immediately see the impact that that change just had on the aero profile on the structural rigidity… It allows a structures engineer to see in a minute what previously took about 15 hours of finite element analysis to understand in terms of how the vehicle would respond to certain load or crash scenarios, and so this collapse has dramatically accelerated and improved the kind of global optimization of the products that we're building."
This level of computational agility allows simultaneous inter-department development, Jason Fischer, executive director of virtual integration engineering at GM told Newsweek saying, “The difference [with] this new operating system is that we're not using our virtual tools to check our designs after the fact. We're actually giving engineers a virtual environment where they can simultaneously optimize the hardware of the vehicle and the software of the vehicle together, and they can inform hardware decisions, they can inform software.”
Utilizing digital twins and virtual builds speeds the process, but an artificial intelligence-enhanced digital environment isn’t the one way the company is developing vehicles. Physical testing, including safety tests and dynamics validations remains just as important as in the past. Advanced digitization and AI implementation has simply sped up the process.
“GM has rewritten its product development playbook and has a new operating system that dramatically increases the pace and the quality of the products that it builds,” Anderson said.