GM’s AI Design Slashes Car Development Time In Half

For decades, automakers enjoyed a luxury that had nothing to do with the softest leather or the smoothest engines. Their luxury was time, with some popular cars and trucks enduring for a decade or longer before they received a full redesign.

The clock is ticking faster now, thanks to China. BYD and other automakers there are speeding electric vehicles (EVs) and other models from drawing board to showrooms in two years or less.

General Motors is among the Western automakers striving to match that blistering pace, by harnessing AI and simulation to dramatically shorten development times. GM’s effort is being spearheaded by Sterling Anderson, the technologist and robotics guru who led development teams for Tesla’s Autopilot and the Model X before cofounding Aurora Innovation, the autonomous trucking company. GM lured Anderson last June as its chief product officer, offering a US $40 million package to guide the development of the automaker’s cars, autonomous models, batteries, software, and other tech.

How GM Is Accelerating Its Designs

In a recent video call, Anderson and Jason Fischer, GM’s executive director of virtual integration engineering, walked me through the company’s latest design processes. But first, Anderson offered a wide-lens view of how AI is transforming everything that came before.

Sterling Anderson, robotics guru and former Tesla executive, is pushing AI to accelerate GM’s design process.General Motors

Anderson sees design and human ingenuity falling into three main epochs, beginning with thousands of years of empirical design that saw creators largely mimicking nature, building and testing models, and advancing from there—slowly, expensively, and narrowly focused.

“Flight is a great example,” Anderson says. “Humans looked to birds and said, ‘Hey, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let’s come up with something like it.’”

The advent of virtual tools such as computer-aided design (CAD) and computational fluid dynamics in the 1950s kicked off a second age, he says. Developers had better ways of doing work, but they remained siloed in an inefficient, pass-the-baton process. “Designers still had to toss something over the wall to other engineers, who ultimately had to build that empirical asset anyway,” Anderson says. In automobiles, that meant building prototype vehicles first and then integrating and assessing myriad functions, many of which were developed separately: electrical systems, thermal controls, safety, ride and handling, and so on.

Today’s third epoch is characterized by AI and simulation that can collapse those functions into a single virtual development tool, Anderson says. In roughly one minute, a structural engineer can see how a design change might affect a finished vehicle, as opposed to the 15 hours it used to take. The result, he says, “is a dramatically accelerated product development process at GM.”

GM is applying this approach to self-driving cars, LMR batteries,…