Why the Full Potential of CAE is Still Not Used in the Automotive Industry and How Future Trends will Improve

For more than 40 years, CAE has been successfully used as a tool in the development process of vehicles. With massive progress in processor performance, numerical methods, visualization, modeling technics, machine learning, etc., CAE has become an extremely powerful tool playing an increasingly significant role in the development process to improve productivity and competitiveness.

But, we are still not using the full potential of CAE. Reasons include a lack of acceptance by management, poor process integration, missing input data, and many more. Despite increasing complexity, development time has been cut back, in particular with new OEMs.

With electrification of the powertrain and improving tools for virtual development, the barriers for new players to enter the automotive market have been reduced. New players have "digital thinking“ with the goal to be as fast and efficient as possible, while legacy automakers are forced to cut costs to reduce complexity and to increase productivity.

The automotive industry faces not only the challenge to fulfill CO2 standards but also to develop semi autonomous or even autonomous vehicles. We have with ADAS, a functionality which can - for the first time in automotive history - only be developed by using numerical tools.

Increasing development speed, combined with technical challenges are influencing CAE and will, along with other factors, significantly strengthen the importance of numerical simulation for the automotive industry in the near future.