FINDLAY, Ohio—General Motors is working to boost the amount of virtual design, development and validation that goes into its vehicles, and is looking for help from its suppliers to meet its goals.
GM doesn’t have plans to shift its entire development system to virtual at this point, but it “looks at a range of tools and innovations to further enhance our development capabilities, and that helps make our teams even more productive throughout the process,” a GM spokesman told Rubber News. “We work with our teams and tools to find the right balance of safety, quality and speed to do so.”
The vehicle maker said that program timings are speeding up, and it needs to move faster with development. Besides saving time, GM also expects that moving to more virtual design will help trim costs from its traditional trial-and-error process of testing to get vehicles and their components ready for production.
And working with its supply base will play a big part in the design evolution moving forward.
“We have been partnering with the supply base to identify the gaps and put together the plans to achieve our ... virtual plans,” Matthew Wieczorek, GM engineering group manager, told attendees of a recent conference in Findlay hosted by Endurica L.L.C.
Now Wieczorek’s profile on LinkedIn may show that he’s managing fuel injection systems for the vehicle giant, but he assured the crowd that rubber is still his area of expertise. He spent 13 years at the Clevite Elastomers Group of Tenneco, before leaving that unit in 2012 to be a resident engineer at GM for Tenneco. He then made the jump in 2014 to work full time for GM.
“We have to keep pace with the rest of the industry,” Wieczorek said. “Hardware tests are always kind of limited in scope. You go to prototype vehicles. You go out and you test them. One fails and the other doesn’t, what do you do? Do you react to it? Do you not react to it? What caused the one to fail and not the other?”