Virtual prototyping examples for automotive industries

The vision of virtual prototyping is to use virtual reality techniques fordesign evaluations and presentations based on a digital model instead of physical prototypes. In the automotive industries, CAD and CAE systems are widely used. This provides a good basis for virtual prototyping. This vision is therefore extremely interesting for automotive industries. Many companies have started to evaluate existing tools and techniques, and think about, or begin to develop virtual prototyping systems for their own needs. In this paper, we present some examples from our recent projects with automotive companies. Based on these examples, we discuss problems, solutions and future directions of R&D to achieve the vision of virtual prototyping.