Deep inside the Ford design centre in Dearborn, Michigan, in a room dimly lit by the flickering glow of video screens, a young stylist is sketching the company's next-generation "world car". As he sweeps an electronic brush across his drawing tablet, bumpers, bonnet and headlights begin to take shape on his high-definition monitor. His thoughts are broken by a disembodied voice booming from a speaker atop his monitor. "I like that," says a colleague at another Ford design studio in Cologne, Germany. "But what if we do it this way?" The image begins to change as a disembodied hand half a world away stretches and bends the newly drawn bumper.
Welcome to the brave new world of the Ford Motor Company, an organisation where market forces and technological change are demolishing national and institutional boundaries. Like many of its competitors, Ford is reinventing itself around the idea of the "world car". Until now, companies designed cars in a particular place for a particular market. The Escort that Ford sells in America, for example, is an entirely different design from the car of the same name sold in Europe. No longer.
In January 1995, Ford began consolidating its operations in Europe, North America, Asia and all points in between into a single, global entity - Ford Automotive Operations. It aims to build cars that buyers all over the world will like, and in so doing slash its costs by US$3 billion or more a year. That means integrating everything about the company on a worldwide basis. It's not just a geographical integration; it's also a functional one, bringing the different parts of the company - design, manufacturing, sales - much closer together. And there's only one place where German designers and Brazilian manufacturers can all work together: cyberspace. Ford has bought itself a pretty big chunk of cyberspace, and that's where its world cars get designed.
Ford is not alone. The car industry is both huge - 60 million cars and trucks built last year and a turnover of more than a trillion dollars - and ever more competitive. New markets are opening up, especially in Asia and Latin America, in countries like Brazil, China, Korea and India. By 2001, worldwide production should push 80 million, according to US consulting firm Autofacts, Inc.
But the developing countries are not just markets. They could also be competitors, with cheap labour giving them an inherent advantage over European and North American manufacturers. Established car-makers like Ford need something new and dramatic in their toolkits to overcome this labour cost disadvantage - hence their dash to pour billions and billions of dollars into information technology.
The assembly line is still a world of sweat and brawn, where barrel-chested men wrestle with iron and steel, hammering together a car. But car-making in America, and throughout the developed world, is coming to depend much more on brains than on brawn - brains aided and connected by silicon chips and optical fibres. The 3D-rendering that lets designers collaborate on tomorrow's cars is as slick as the slickest Hollywood special effects. Long before the first clay models or fibreglass mock-ups are built, digital designs are sent through virtual wind tunnels and undergo simulated crash tests. Before the assembly line is tooled up, its tiniest details are simulated, years before production actually begins. And the consumer, instead of seeing just the end product, helps to shape it from the beginning.
The flow of cars along assembly lines is no longer the core of the car company; the flow of information through the company's networks now takes centre stage. And that flow of information represents the idea of a car - a mutable, testable, portable idea that anyone in the world can share in. Ron Bienkowski, executive engineer in charge of Chrysler's Technical Computer Centre, puts it simply: "What you need to create is a virtual car. You've got to design, engineer and build it digitally, long before the first real car rolls off the assembly line." Everything in the company has to refer to this digitally encoded car; it will become what everyone in the company has in common.
In laboratories, factories, offices and showrooms around the world, the developed world's car-makers are spending huge amounts of money on that dream. And they seem to be getting pretty close.
Shop-floor revolution
"Throughout history, man's imagination has only been limited by his technology. Today, his technology is limited only by his imagination," says Tom Scott. He's a small, endlessly enthusiastic man, with a greying, military moustache, curly hair and an impish smile. The accent is British; he's one of a growing number of UK expats who are rising to positions of power in the new global Ford.As design director for the company's advanced design team, Scott has become both student and guru of the automobile industry's electronic future, and is responsible for striking novelties such as Ford's radical sports prototype, the GT 90. The GT90 is a wedge-like, dust-buster spaceship of a car. The walls of Scott's cluttered office are covered with a mix of new-car "beauty shots", sketches, technical designs and holograms. "We've come a long way in not a very long time," Scott marvels.
Until a few years ago, car designers worked with the same tools as carriage-makers did a century ago. A designer spent his day bent over a drawing board, churning out dozens of sketches, the best of which were transferred to life-size "tape" drawings. Skilled model-makers would be assigned to translate those tape drawings into meticulous mock-ups made of clay, wood or fibreglass. Working with the designer, a model-maker would shave a fender here, or build up a roof-line there, until the four-wheeled work of art came to life. Then they'd call in management for approval. If the boss rejected it, they were literally back to the drawing board. Once okayed, the model would be carefully measured, and the data used to carve the tools and stamping dies in the 500-ton presses that turn sheets of steel into curvaceous car bodies.
Then the engineers had to sort out how to make it all work - how to squeeze in an engine, a cooling system, brakes and hoses, headlights, wiring harnesses and the rest of the 12,000 to 15,000 parts and pieces in a typical car. And then they had to put the whole thing together, step by step. It's a slow series of compromises and delays that still leaves plenty of room for errors - like the one that allowed the sleek, sexy Dodge Viper sports car to go into production with its right door half an inch longer than the left. Even without mistakes, the sheer time and expense involved is lethal. Ford's first true world car, the Mondeo, cost the company $6 billion and took nearly six years to bring to market. Despite warm reviews and strong sales, company insiders admit it will be difficult, if not impossible, for Ford ever to recoup the money it invested in developing the Mondeo.
Time is not just money spent - it can be a short-lived opportunity to earn money lost forever. Take the grim story of General Motors' launch of the Oldsmobile Cutlass and a bunch of other mid-size coupés in the mid-1980s. When development work began, two-doors were the hottest thing in the American market; but by the time production had started, buyers by the millions had switched to four-door sedans. It's no wonder that GM is desperate to speed things up. "We hope to cut product development time to about 24 months," Kenneth R. Baker, vice president at GM's R&D centre and all-round high-tech guru, declared last summer. Other firms are aiming for 20 months. The goal, says Baker, is to create a company that will be a "hypercompetitor": a company that is so quick it outdates itself before anyone else can. A company with its centre of mass at least one production cycle into the future. "It will be able to outdate itself technically before someone else does. It will be agile enough to sense and respond to individual customers globally. And it will be able to create and deliver products, services and experiences that surprise and delight."
Crashing in computers
The speed and vision needed to be a global hypercompetitor comes from a whole set of technologies introduced into car-making over the past 20 years - in particular, computer-aided design and electronic data interchange. When they were first introduced, CAD systems were just automatic drafting boards for designers like Tom Scott, and not much more useful to the company than dedicated word-processing terminals in the typing pool. Over time, though, they became more important. Scott points not only to improvements in speed and efficiency, but also to gains in creativity and quality.The biggest change, though, occurs when advanced CAD systems are supplemented with huge internal networking power. Designs can be shared by designers, engineers and others in the company and beyond, before heading directly for the automated machine tools departmenton the component makers' shop floors - a whole new way of doing things.
"I started thinking about the need to change things when I first came to the company 40 years ago," says the car-maker's 63-year-old chairman and CEO Alex Trotman. But until recently, "we didn't have the technology to make it work. Now we do, and it is a critical part of the project." That project is the reorganisation of all of Ford's car-making into the Ford 2000 scheme - exactly the type of balls-to-the-wall challenge the former Royal Air Force pilot relishes. That technology consists of around half-a-dozen Cray supercomputers already installed, with more on order.
"We can simultaneously do the tax returns of everyone in the United States within 30 minutes," boasts computing executive Dr Howard Crabb. Which might exceedingly generous - but that isn't really the point. Ford is using that enormous power, which is believed to be the greatest in private hands anywhere in the world, to pull off combined design-and-engineering feats that would have been impossible even a few years ago. The automaker has established a web of fibre-optic cables, T3 phone lines and satellite transponders capable of moving billions of bytes a second between these huge number-crunchers and the rest of the company.
It not only allows designers on opposite sides of the globe to work simultaneously on the same sketch. It allows engineers to watch over their electronic shoulders, warning them about trade-offs and compromises that will be faced in the actual manufacturing process - while running their own models to see what those trade-offs might be. Once, designers threw their finished designs "over the wall" to manufacturing and subsequently washed their hands of them. Now, thanks to technology and a rearrangement of the way the company works, design and manufacturing sit in the same wall-less space.
The virtual car that stands at the centre of all this is not just a focus for discussion between designers and engineers. You can play with it too. While still in digital form, the prototype can be tested in virtual wind tunnels or put through an electronic crash test. The savings that this brings - in both time and money - are enormous. A metal and glass prototype can cost more than $250,000, and takes weeks to build. Fail the crash test and your programme's put on hold until they build another prototype. And changing something as simple as a headlight may force you to go through another round of crash tests.
But do it digitally, and all it costs is CPU time. Ford's algorithms have become so sophisticated that a crash test on a Cray takes less than half an hour. And the results are essentially identical to control tests run with real glass and metal - tests that now cap the process, rather than dominate it.
Learner drivers
The driver presses the pedal to the floor as his new Mercedes shoots onto the Autobahn. As he nears 160kph, a truck darts into his lane. There's a squeal of tyres followed by a crunch of metal as he goes spinning onto the shoulder and into a guard-rail. Not to worry. A Mercedes-Benz technician has been carefully monitoring the "accident" from a control room just a few yards away. He presses the reset button, and the drive begins all over again.Mercedes recently finished upgrading its massive, computerised driving-simulator in Berlin. Slip inside one of the vehicle mock-ups and you'll have a hard time believing you're not on the Autobahn. The system operates much like the flight simulators that airlines use for training pilots, but it's not the driver who's being trained - it's the design team and their idea of the car. "Normally, it takes several years from the time you come up with the original concept until a driveable vehicle is available," explains Mercedes' Hanns-Joerg Schmieder, but "if you can describe a concept in mathematical terms, you are able to recreate the vehicle on our simulator and make it driveable" - before ever getting close to a factory, let alone a test circuit.
Elsewhere in cyberspace, the shell of a new Chrysler sedan inches its way down the assembly line, until a monstrous body fixture grapples it into place. With a flurry of sparks and hisses, robot arms swing into action, welding the roof on to a new Neon sedan. But as one of the welding guns makes its pass down the panel of steel, it gently nicks a protruding beam. The robotic arm that holds it is knocked a few millimetres out of position, enough to weld the door shut. A disaster in the making? No. With a couple of taps on his keyboard, a Chrysler engineer puts the assembly line into reverse. Another keystroke and the offending beam disappears. The line begins to run again. This time, all welds are on target.
A virtual test track is one thing. A virtual factory is quite another level of complexity. But what Chrysler has here comes close to being a "factory in a box". With a smile, Bernard Charles calls it an "interactive movie of the manufacturing process". Charles is president of the R&D unit of Dassault Systèmes, a subsidiary of France's Dassault Aviation and a leader in large scale automated manufacturing.
Why do new models take so long to get off the drawing board? One reason is that not only does the car have to be designed - so do the production lines. Get the changes to production wrong (and there are always mistakes) and you have to retrace your steps. The idea behind Dassault's Digital Manufacturing Process System is to allow the production-line designers the same sort of flexibility that CAD offers Tom Scott and his colleagues - the ability to try out different approaches before committing. The same company's CATIA system was used to put together the digital prototype of the Boeing 777 in cyberspace, and enabled the first real 777 that passed through Boeing's production facility to come out perfectly airworthy - a first in the world of aviation.
Some are going even further, imagining not models of old manufacturing but completely new manufacturing techniques based on digital technology. At Chrysler's Jeep-Truck Engineering Centre on the east side of Detroit there's a room that is unnervingly reminiscent of the transporter room on the Enterprise. With the flip of a switch a technician sends a blue laser-beam dancing across the surface of a pool of liquid epoxy. A solid form begins to take shape, micron by micron. "If you can conceive it in your mind, we can build it for you," brags Thomas Sorovetz, Chrysler's supervisor of Rapid Prototyping.
Stereo lithography like that going on in the blue pool of epoxy uses laser beams to select precisely where a chemical reaction takes place. If both beams shine on a spot at once, the epoxy solidifies. A computer model of a shape drives the lasers - and the shape appears, a real Venus rising from a blue virtual sea. Stereo lithography is one of a number of rapid prototyping technologies. Though they can't work with a wide range of materials so they can't make production parts, they can make remarkably good facsimiles. Often, says Sorovetz, that's all you need to speed the development of individual components by as much as 80%.
Depending on their size and speed, these machines can cost almost $500,000 apiece. But Chrysler has saved tens of millions on tooling and modelling costs alone. It saved even more in terms of embarrassment. The Jeep Grand Cherokee almost went into production with a faulty part that would eventually have forced a recall. The rapid prototyping facility found the flaw when no one else could.
Another triumph for the technology was on the race track. A few years back, Chrysler's new Viper roadster was supposed to serve as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, and engineers were struggling to develop an exhaust system that was up to the challenge. They finally hammered out an acceptable design, but discovered that it would take 18 weeks to construct a working model. As a last resort they turned to the stereo lithography system, then in its infancy. Within a few hours, they had an epoxy model. Using it as a mould, they handcrafted a unique metal manifold in time for the Viper to do its laps at Indy.
"I believe we're at the beginning of a major revolution, not only in engineering, but in the very way we manufacture products. And it is as significant as the creation of the assembly line," insists Bob Voiers. As director of the EDS Virtual Reality Centre, a showcase of VR technology on the fringes of downtown Detroit, this self-styled visionary is manning the barricades. A gentle good humour underscores Voiers' missionary zeal. "Do you really believe [cars] are always going to be made of iron and steel?" he asks, giddily shaking one of the most basic tenets of heavy manufacturing.
It's hard to imagine whole cars emerging from the ooze of liquid epoxy. But cars like the Saturn subcompact are already being made with plastic body panels baked in moulds like loaves of bread. Virtual cars may come to be realised in all sorts of ways, and likewise may generate any number of manufacturing systems to make them real.
In the driving seat
Voiers' inner sanctum is "the Cave". It doesn't look like much at first: a small room, about 4m square, with dull white walls and a car seat in the middle. But slip on a pair of shutter glasses, each lens flickering on and off more than 30 times a second, and suddenly you're sitting inside a new car. The instrument panel is so close you can almost touch it. And though you can't, there's something even more entertaining to do. Point a special hand-grip, press the button, and the clock changes from digital to analogue. Hold down the other button and you find yourself wielding a green beam, rather like Luke Skywalker's light sabre. Let it sizzle across the speedometer and you can lift the instrument right out of its socket, pick it up and move it wherever you want. With the Cave, GM is putting customer focus groups in the driving seat. Potential customers are helping it shape the very layout and look of its new car interiors.The Cave, which is driven by high powered Silicon Graphics machines, is more than just a high-tech experiment. It was used extensively in the design of GM's teardrop-shaped EV1, a two-seater that is GM's first battery-powered car in half a century. However, with a $35,000 price tag and only 120km on the clock before it needs recharging, the EV1 is a car that many will find hard to love. So GM put a lot of work into making other parts of it just right - by asking potential customers into the Cave to let them play with the look and feel of the interior.
"The perception is that virtual reality is great for games and toys, but the fact is, there are plenty of tremendous things we'll be able to do with this technology," Voiers says, his voice straining with enthusiasm. It's not just a matter of looks: customers also want a car that feels right, smells right and sounds right. Smell isn't digitised - though the Cave itself will soon include relevant scents - but sound is. Mazda engineers recorded more than 100 different exhaust "notes" when they developed their Miata sports car. They were looking for that perfect, sonorous thrum, a note that would make Miata's meek four-cylinder engine sound sexy and gutsy.
Call it acoustical alchemy. Half a dozen consumers are huddled into a darkened room in a corner of Ford's Automotive Engineering Centre (AEC). As they slip on special binaural headphones, they are asked to imagine themselves sitting inside a new, full-size sedan. The thought is driven home by the thud of a heavy car door closing, seemingly inches in front of them. Then a second door closes. A third and a fourth. "Which one did you like best?" the moderator asks, prodding them to press the appropriate button on their remote control. A moment later, the votes are tallied up on a computer screen.
While some motorists prefer not to hear their engines and others want to hear nothing else, there is a widespread consensus on other sounds, such as the solid thud of a shutting door. Now that consensus can be measured and designed into the product. "The key," says Norm Otto, a researcher at Ford's Sound Perception and Quality Lab, "is to allow people to express what they're hearing in a simple, easy way." At AEC, Ford is fine-tuning these preferences, engineering noises into and out of cars like so much seat fabric.
What's next on the VR front? Technologically, there's a lot of debate. Some, like Voiers, favour refinements of the Cave and its relatives. Others, though, have wilder dreams. Tom Scott at Ford wants to take holograms off credit cards and wrap his customers up in them. He and his staff have been fanning out all over the world hunting down the latest breakthroughs. There's a Russian-made green laser only 30cm long, about a tenth the size of older models. That makes it easier and far less expensive to create full-colour holograms. And a rotating mirror developed at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, may soon make it possible to project a hologram the size of a real car. At that point, Scott suggests, car companies may never again need to build prototypes.
But if Voiers and Scott differ on the technological directions, they share similar goals. They want automotive designers and engineers to begin using virtual reality workstations within the next year or two. The designers will see life-like, three-dimensional images floating in front of them. Using gloves with air-bladders fitted snugly to their skin, they'll be able to "touch" and "feel" their designs, using a finger, rather than a brush, to shape a curve. New, life-size projection systems will completely replace clay and fibreglass mock-ups in the product review process. These ethereal images will be more than enough for the board to bet their stockholders' billions on. And VR technology will leave the laboratories and design studios.
You can already dial up a virtual test drive of cars like the BMW Z3 roadster on the Internet, created with Apple's QuickTime VR system. But for the ultimate virtually automotive experience, you'll head to the showroom - which may well be in your local supermarket, or in a mall. There, in a space barely big enough for a few desks, you'll be able to see every vehicle in the company's line-up, every model, every option and colour. Call it the place where the motorway merges into the information superhighway. You'll be able to open the hood, sit "inside" the car and do things you could never do before, like rolling the car over to look beneath it, or peeling back the sheet metal to see how it's put together. "Until you touch it," Scott says with a smile, "you'll believe it's real." And in business terms it will be - real as only the bottom line can make it.