General Motors says artificial intelligence and simulation tools are allowing it to develop new vehicles in around half the time it used to take.
Speaking at the GM Forward event in New York, GM chief product officer Sterling Anderson said the traditional development process worked like a relay race, with designers handing sketches to engineers, who then handed blueprints to manufacturing.
"This sequential process, and iterations between it, on average took the industry four to five years," he said.
GM's executive director of virtual integration, Jason Fischer, said the new 'concurrent engineering' approach brings that down significantly.
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"This operating system will allow us to develop vehicles in two years, where conventionally it takes quite a bit longer," Mr Fischer said.
The headline example is aerodynamics. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations can take up to 60 hours to run, which in practice means one design iteration a day.
GM has developed its own machine learning tool, trained on decades of in-house data, that Mr Anderson said produces results "remarkably similar to CFD" in about 60 seconds.
The same approach is being applied elsewhere. Mr Anderson said a battery screening campaign for GM's new lithium manganese-rich (LMR) cells would normally require more than 60,000 lab hours. GM's team did it in 256, taking the battery from first pack concept to formal program approval in less than a month.
GM says the new V8 engines in the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado were also developed in around a third of the usual time.
Mr Fischer said GM can now compress around 100 days of test data into a single day, and calibrate powertrain, stability control, ABS, and thermal systems in a driver-in-the-loop simulator before a prototype is even built.
The best example came from the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1. Mr Fischer said the car initially hit 231mph (372km/h) in top-speed testing, but GM's virtual model said it should be capable of around 233mph (375km/h).
The team in Pontiac re-spun the powertrain calibration overnight, and the next day the car hit 233mph.
"What that means is our virtual engineering is confirming what we already know, and allowing our engineers to perfect the vehicle at the end instead of discovering issues late," he said.
GM says it has invested more than US$16 billion (A$23bn) in US research and development and manufacturing this year alone.
That includes digital twins of its factories to test layouts before any tooling goes in, a robotics platform Mr Anderson said can test a robot's grip in half a second, and tools that have cut battery pack assembly time by around 30 per cent.
GM's director of global EV architecture, Zach Walker, said the centralised computer coming to GM vehicles from 2028 also means new features can arrive via over-the-air updates mid-cycle, rather than waiting for a new model.
Faster development should mean fresher product, sooner.
GM currently sells the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, E-Ray, and Z06 here in factory right-hand drive, along with the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and Silverado HD and GMC Yukon Denali which are locally remanufactured in right-hand drive. There's also a range of electric Cadillac SUVs, which like the Corvette are built in right-hand drive.
While GM offers a range of Corvettes here, the ZR1 isn't one of them. It's produced only in left-hand drive.
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