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Ford expects to cut its product development time to just 12 months by 2012. The OEM believes CAE will determine its future competitiveness.

Global overcapacity and fierce competition in emerging markets is continuing to drive down product development time. Current average development times are around 18 months to two years.

“We’re about to enter a new era where vehicle attributes such as NVH, safety, vehicle dynamics, performance and fuel economy will be fully co-ordinated,” said John Sullivan, Ford’s director of process, methods, tools and information. “Ford will be there within the next five years.”

Ford plans to perform cross-attribute trade-offs in real-time. It will enable quicker whole-vehicle optimisation by developing systems in parallel rather than in sequence. This has been the aim of CAE development for several decades, but it is still not possible. There is too much data, not enough computing power.

Ford has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its global product development system, standardising the digital processes used throughout the business, with CAE at the heart.
Ford currently does things in Europe that it doesn’t share with the US and vice-versa. By the end of this year all Ford companies will be using the same network, however.

“We’ve transformed our business in the last five years,” said Sullivan. “Ford, Jaguar-LandRover, Volvo, Mazda are all part of this global system and we’re all using CAE as the enabler.”

The 2007 Mondeo is one of the first products to benefit from this system.