How to design a virtual car - Ford Predator

Automotive Industries, Jan, 1998 by Mark Phelan

Mark Gerisch's world changed one day last spring. After 17 years hand-building replicas of exotic cars for celebrities, he suddenly found himself with access to top-flight CAD/CAM hardware, software and support services.

Several months later, voila: Gerisch and his development partners unveiled the Predator, a 550hp supercharged and intercooled V-10 Ford-powered mid-engined supercar. He hopes to build 250 Predators beginning in 2000, selling them for $150,000 each.

"The world I come from is very hands-on and paper intensive," says Gerisch, owner of M&L Auto Specialists in Two Rivers, Wis. "This hardware and software completely changed my thinking."

That's the idea. Hewlett-Packard, EDS Unigraphics, Engineering Animation Inc., ICEM Technologies and MacNeal-Schwendler Corp. threw their expensive products and high-powered talent at Gerisch's little company to promote the idea of totally computerized design and engineering.

"The Predator project is an example of how the design process can be virtually completely automated," says Larry Anderson, outbound marketing manager of Hewlett-Packard's workstations Division. "We traditionally work with larger companies, but this let us demonstrate the breadth of the process, from styling to manufacturing simulations."

Hewlett-Packard provided three Unix work stations, three Windows NT PCs and a network to tie them together. Anderson says one of his company's goals was showing how much CAD/CAM work the PC could do before the models had to move to Unix machines for models encompassing the entire car.

The software suppliers participated both to demonstrate how they could automate the entire design process and to show how their products function together.

Engineering Animation supplied VisFly and VisMockup, visual communications and prototyping software that allows data from the other suppliers to be integrated into a single system to view the entire vehicle. "We found a number of interferences by parts in the chassis," says Pat Nola, Engineering Animation director of software marketing. "ICEM and Unigraphics create the content. We view and review it."

ICEM contributed ICEM Surf, surface modeling software that created the Predator's surface from math data and allowed Gerisch to develop the car based on a single scale model. "M&L had prototype metal skins," says Ron Myszkowski, ICEM industry consultant. "They were locked into the geometry, but not the details, and we made a number of changes in the roof, vent and rear-end design."

EDS joined the project Sept. 10. "M&L was sketching parts on paper," says Rich Borremans, industry services. "They had boxes of components lying around. As they built the car, we measured parts and built a CAD model." He says that CAD model will make the design repeatable when production begins.

The EDS team took the ICEM model of the car's body and put it on a model of the Predator's tube-frame structure. EDS then designed the body openings and hinges.

MacNeal-Schwendler provided its Pawn software, which interfaced with the EDS CAD software for finite element analysis. That allowed Gerisch to take weight out of the car throughout the process. "We modeled the suspension, frame, types of welds and spring types and rates," says Ahmad Kabalan, senior application engineer

Now Gerisch surveys his brave new world and talks about a Dakota-based sport truck and three bolt-in modular rear suspensions his team developed concurrent to the Predator. "We'll build 250 Predators and move on," he says. "Keep supply low and interest high. It works for Ferrari; it can work for an American company that has the right development process."