Apparently during the pandemic, I spent so much time on digital content that I stopped reading print magazines. Last weekend I tried to catch up on reading my 2021 Popular Mechanics magazines and one article blew my mind. The story, "How the Air Force Secretly Designed and Flew a New Fighter in One Year" (here's another DefenseNews article on the subject), describes how simulations helped designers go from concept to viable finished product in a fraction of the time. once taken to design, model, build, test, retest, and then risk death while pilots fixed design bugs.
In the simulation, you can safely crash the plane an unlimited number of times with no loss of life and deliver a product that, even in its early prototype form, is probably much safer to fly than many production planes. It was with technology that he's now two years into a segment we're now loosely calling the Metaverse, and he's progressing incredibly fast. This suggests that the time required to design and build almost any product is greatly reduced.
Let's talk about how simulation accelerates the speed of innovation.
the omniverse
The platform I'm most familiar with and use a lot for simulation is Nvidia's Omniverse (Nvidia is a client). Nvidia shared the development of this platform at its latest event, and the success is such that all the major automotive companies are using it to create autonomous cars. While not all automakers use Nvidia's full stack of hardware, I hope some will regret not doing so. Saving a few dollars on a critical security system tends to end badly. If it results in the loss of a human life, it implies that the company has valued a few dollars in savings on someone's life. I (the jury accepts this argument, trials and related settlements tend to be record-setting).
Before the Omniverse arrived, we were largely talking about self-driving cars around 2030. But several automakers, including Jaguar and GM, have now indicated that they will have commercial level 4 systems on the market in the 2025-26 timeframe.
This is a major improvement to the timeline. If you consider that Tier 5 driverless cars are likely to be limited by regulatory approvals, not technology, that may have had an even bigger impact on driverless cars' time to market than we did.
Why is time to market important?
When I first got into competitive analysis, I studied Ford/GM's response to Japanese cars in the 1960s: the Pinto and the Vega (from Ford and GM, respectively). Both would have been very competitive with Japanese brands in the late 1960s, but were not at all when they appeared in the early 1970s.
What happened? GM and Ford bought Japanese cars, did extensive analysis of them, and from that analysis developed the Pinto and Vega. The whole process took about five years. But in the meantime, Japanese cars have progressed, so by the time the Vega and Pinto came along, they were already five years old.
If you cut the typical five-year development time for a car down to one (it's hard to do faster because of regulatory testing requirements), automakers would be able to respond more quickly to competitive threats, and the global auto market would grow a lot. faster year-to-year.
The military advantage
As "Popular Science" noted, when it comes to weapons, simulations can offer a huge advantage. Often the weapons used at the end of a war have come a long way since the war began, often at the cost of life for those who must test these rapidly evolving platforms.
With simulations, an army could have next-generation weapons based on what has been learned on the battlefield in less than a year, weapons that have been better tested than weapon systems created in a more traditional research and development effort. . They are also probably much cheaper (because you can optimize them under simulation). And they can be custom designed for the unique demands of today's conflict.
The country that can do this would have a huge advantage on the battlefield.
Simulations and complexity
Simulation allows for a relatively safe increase in time to market for new products, be they weapons or automobiles. Unsurprisingly, the military is already showing off its capabilities by creating a mature next-generation fighter within a year. In times of war, this could be done more quickly, allowing a company to adapt its major and minor weapons systems to the unique needs of an ongoing conflict in a matter of months.
For vehicles and other complex products, simulation technology will enable companies to better respond to competitive threats and act more aggressively to mitigate them. If you already think things are changing fast, get ready, because change, thanks to advances in simulation, is about to happen even faster.
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