Car makers use AI to speed up design and testing at GM and Nissan

In short: Car makers like GM and Nissan are using AI to shorten the time it takes to design, test, and build new cars.

What's going on

Car design still often starts with a hand-drawn sketch, then teams refine it, turn it into a 3D model, and sometimes sculpt it in clay. That whole process, plus engineering and software work, can take about five years.

General Motors (GM) told The Verge it is using AI in the early design stage to move faster. A GM designer said they can feed a sketch into a tool called Vizcom and get a detailed 3D model and even a short animation in hours. GM said this used to take multiple teams and could take months.

GM is also using AI to test how air moves around a car shape, which affects efficiency and noise. This kind of testing is called computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, which is basically a “virtual wind tunnel” (like blowing air at a model, but in a computer). GM says its AI model can predict drag quickly, so designers can change the shape and get near-instant feedback.

Other companies are doing similar work. Neural Concept, a Swiss company, says it can speed up these airflow simulations. Jaguar Land Rover said at Nvidia’s GTC event that some airflow jobs dropped from four hours to one minute.

Nissan is focusing more on software work. It said it is using AI tools to automate repetitive tasks like unit tests (small checks that make sure pieces of code work). Nissan is aiming to cut new car development time to about 30 months.

What to watch

Companies say AI is meant to help workers, not replace them, but some designers and educators think job cuts could still happen as productivity rises. Watch for whether faster tools lead to smaller design teams, and whether quicker development changes the kinds of cars that actually reach showrooms.

Source: The Verge AI