If someone had uttered the term virtual reality (VR) a decade ago, you might have thought of people playing video games with funny headsets. Fast-forward to 2024, and VR is so much more. One industry riding this wave with great success is the automotive industry.
Car designers enter virtual worlds, test their cars on virtual roads, and refine everything before a single physical part is made. Now, imagine that would sound pretty futuristic, wouldn’t it? It is real, though.
Below, we dive into how virtual reality disrupted automotive design and share with you how it saves time and cost and enables them to make safer and better cars. A number of personal experiences are thrown in here and there, with more simplified insights that try not to let the subject be too science fiction-esque.
Time to get started!
How VR is Used in Automotive Design
Detailing how VR transforms the automotive design:
1. Faster, Better Car Design
But again, VR catapults designers inside a virtual car to see its interior, tinker with the placement of the dashboard, or simply adjust seat placement of it in real time, no clay models, and no guesswork.
Example: At Ford, this helps give confidence to designers about what dashboard and mirror visibility would work properly. If something does not really feel right, they easily make the changes immediately right from the virtual model. So, precision saves months of effort at hand.
2. Cost-Effective Prototyping
Car prototyping is very expensive and time-consuming. VR saves a lot because it does not need several prototypes, as one digital model can be tested repeatedly, saving millions of dollars.
Personal Anecdote: My friend works at an automotive startup, and she told me about how they built their first electric car entirely in VR before creating the first physical version. “We saved months,” she said. “VR lets us test designs without wasting resources.”
3. Seamless Collaboration
Every once in a while, designers can literally set designer teams of cars from any other part of the world at work since VR allows us common time dimensions to collaborate freely. The designers and the engineers from every part have the ability to come virtually to a mutual place to check out one common car.
The Simplified Version: This means that the car designer from Germany could actually share his notes with an engineer fine-tuning the virtual model of the car while literally seated in Japan.
How VR is Revolutionizing Automotive Testing
You are probably thinking that things stop at design; no, it doesn’t. In several other ways, testing especially shines for VR.
1. Simulating Real-World Scenarios: VR allows engineers to test cars under conditions that are either not achievable in real life or dangerous. For example,
Weather Conditions: How will the car behave in heavy rain, snow, or fog? Try it out virtually with VR.
Road Types: Smooth highways, country roads, steep mountainous roads—every type of road the car will travel on can be tested by the engineers in VR.
Simulare siguranță: The real-world crash tests are rather dangerous and very expensive, whereas VR crash simulations are way safer and much quicker to analyse.
Simple example: Audi utilises VR to simulate driving conditions under which it tunes its vehicle’s aerodynamics. Just imagine having an eternal road to test and never really needing to leave the lab.
2. Testing Autonomous Cars
Self-driving cars, of course, are the future, and testing them on roads is not feasible; virtual traffic scenarios created using VR would definitely help in the safe training of an autonomous vehicle.
Example: Tesla and Waymo are well known to fine-tune their self-driving algorithms in VR simulators before actually deploying them to the streets.
Benefits of VR in Car Design and Testing
1. Saves Time: VR eliminates superfluous steps in the design and testing chain. A process that required several months can now be done within a few weeks.
2. Cuts Costs: This automatically leads to huge savings in cost due to fewer physical prototypes and fewer real-world tests.
3. Improves Safety: Emulation of dangerous situations using VR ensures safety for test drivers and engineers alike.
4. More Accurate Designs: Every detail to the last button is tested and improved by the use of VR. Thus, this makes for more efficient and driver-friendly cars.
5. Eco-Friendly: Fewer prototypes and fewer tests mean less waste and a smaller carbon footprint.
Practical Examples of VR in the Automotive Industry
Following are some leading automobile companies that are already taking advantage of VR:
1. Ford: Ford uses VR in ergonomics, visibility, and interior testing. In this respect, it allows their staff to create better vehicles without having to rely on physical prototypes.
2. BMW: Coming back to BMW, the Virtual Reality Lab it built would help the designers walk down the 3D car models and test almost every car interior and exterior before production.
3. Audi: Audi deploys VR for both simulating aerodynamics and also driver training. Save millions by refining car performance in virtual mode.
4. Tesla: Tesla uses VR simulations for the testing of autonomous driving algorithms, none in real-life on-road.
Future of VR in Automotive
The usage of VR is going to further increase in design and test environments for the automotive sector. A few possibilities over the next few years:
Virtual Showrooms: Imagine going to a virtual showroom to experience your dream car before buying it.
AR Integration: Probably, it will let the engineers project virtual designs on real prototypes.
AI-Powered VR Simulations: Advanced AI algorithms further make VR testing realistic.
Personal opinion: once the price of the hardware comes down and is available, all small auto companies too will use VR in their effort to stand out among giants.
In Conclusion, VR Is Driving the Automotive Industry Forward Virtual reality is no longer a dream of the future but a present reality. Virtual reality has revolutionized designing and testing cars in their design, testing, and honing.
1. It saves time.
2. It cuts costs.
3. It makes the cars much safer and superior.
For the car enthusiast, designer, and engineer, VR is a revolution, not a tool.
The next time you get inside a car and go in awe at how wonderfully everything fits, know this: somewhere out there, it has probably been tried by a bunch of engineers in a virtual room.