General Motors says artificial intelligence and advanced simulation tools are dramatically shortening the time needed to develop new vehicles, with some projects now taking around half as long as before.
At GM’s Forward event in New York, executives explained how the company has moved away from a traditional development process in which designers, engineers and manufacturing teams worked largely in sequence. Its new concurrent engineering approach allows several areas to be developed simultaneously.
General Motors says it can compress around 100 days of testing into a single day and evaluate powertrain, ABS, stability control and thermal systems in a simulator before building a prototype.
Aerodynamics is another major area. GM’s machine-learning tool, trained using decades of internal data, can reportedly produce results similar to computational fluid dynamics simulations in about 60 seconds, compared with up to 60 hours previously.
Battery development has also benefited. A screening programme for new LMR cells that would normally require more than 60,000 lab hours was completed in just 256 hours.
GM believes this approach could reduce vehicle development timelines to around two years.
Source: Car Expert
