GM design team utilises AI for initial sketches

Jakarta (ANTARA) - The automotive company General Motors (GM) is utilising artificial intelligence (AI) to produce the latest designs that will be used by its professional designers in creating new vehicles.

According to a report from CarsCoops on Monday, GM’s design studio and engineering laboratory do not reject the presence of this technology, as it is believed to help realise ideas from paper to the virtual world more quickly than before.

Nevertheless, GM’s professional designers do not fully entrust designs to AI. New designs still begin with designers creating sketches with pencils, but from there, artificial intelligence can quickly and easily generate complex renders and even detailed 3D animations.

A professional designer from GM stated that producing a single vehicle design typically takes months.

In fact, the team can also generate dozens of variations from one design and then refine them. AI also gives designers time to develop more ideas, drawing inspiration from their imagination, putting ideas on paper, and then letting the tools bring these sketches to life.

“Instead of just following one path, we can explore more things, and we can be more relaxed with those ideas,” said Shapiro, a professional designer from GM.

One of GM’s teams has successfully developed an AI-powered tool that functions as a virtual wind tunnel for aerodynamic sketches, predicting a vehicle’s aerodynamic drag from digital renderings.

In the past, GM relied on CFD and full-scale wind tunnel testing, but these were expensive and time-consuming, with tests potentially taking months.

In comparison, the team can now adjust the roofline or bonnet of a future vehicle and, almost in real-time, see how it affects the vehicle’s aerodynamics.