The age of the digital vehicle experience

SAE 100 Future look: Automotive historians will remember the beginning of the 21st century as a defining moment in the history of an industry.

The next ten years will see an unprecedented convergence of simulation technologies that will forever change the way we buy cars and the way the industry designs them. The future will be the digital vehicle experience-an incredibly life-like virtual environment in which customer wishes will be simulated so realistically that the buyer will experience the vehicle before it exists.

Sound fanciful? It isn't. In the area of vehicle design, we are fast leaving the physical world behind. Today, design exists in a digital realm in which engineers simulate a vehicle's performance, modify its appearance, and communicate the effects to every corner of the supply chain without expensive, inefficient physical prototypes. Digital simulations predict down to the minutest detail how a design will perform as a physical object, and how to design the tools, production lines, and facilities to manufacture the vehicle.