Automotive Design

Slow and steady doesn’t work anymore in the fiercely competitive automotive market. Brand recognition and customer loyalty are most often won by those companies that bring the latest technologies to market early, especially as the industry turns to electric vehicles. It’s no secret that disruptive ideas are more likely to come from new thinking enabled by agile tools and agile product design.

Operating successfully in a changing market calls for agility, not merely doing the same thing faster. Teams that pivot quickly trust Onshape for agile design, adopting the best practices from software development for manufacturing. End up by the side of the road? Not with Onshape.

With Onshape’s cloud-native platform, cross-disciplinary teams design related parts and subassemblies together, even simultaneously, to bring automotive makers to the finish line on time and on budget. Even better, alternate design solutions can be branched and explored in parallel, either together or independently, then merged to arrive at the best possible solution faster. With Onshape, automakers finish first.

To scale and grow, EV manufacturers must steer through an obstacle course of evolving regulations, part shortages, sustainability pressures, and the need to deliver high-quality products to market quickly.

Turn to Onshape’s built-in PDM tools instead of chasing down the latest design version yourself. A live history leaves no confusion by storing and tracking all of the design changes and metadata associated with parts and assemblies, making it effortless for users to locate and reuse existing designs. That adds up to saving time and money.

Onshape and Arena’s cloud-native CAD and PLM platform centralizes product data from design to production, helping teams meet tight product launch timelines and maintain regulatory compliance. Decisions are accelerated with real-time analytics and Dashboards that track your projects helping design issues get fixed faster and teams to reroute when faced with supply chain disruptions.

Automotive designers and engineers need to marry aesthetics and practicality as they look to deliver vehicles that look, perform, and operate differently from last year’s model. Processes must be tightly synchronized around the CAD design data because even the smallest refresh of a component requires close collaboration and multiple points of feedback during development and manufacturing.

Onshape’s secure sharing and collaboration tools help teams to break down vehicle complexity and co-design products in real time, leveraging separate engineering disciplines and key suppliers to make steady progress towards production. Onshape’s compatibility with industry-standard data formats reduces barriers to successful collaboration, and all changes to the design data are recorded and tracked in real time. No more scavenger hunts for information, fewer emails and status meetings. With Onshape, teams can focus on realizing the potential of their designs without the frustrations of bad communication.

Modern drivers and their passengers expect new vehicles to come with in-built connectivity. Why? They’re looking for a better driving and ownership experience along with advanced safety features.

Increased vehicle telemetry requires designers and engineers to work more with sensors, antennas and PCBs so vehicles can receive and transmit data with more external devices and services.

Onshape’s PCB Studio connects ECAD data with Onshape’s MCAD design environment, helping designers to get products to market faster as mechanical and electrical designs develop in parallel. In Onshape, the initial PCB design can evolve concurrently with the mechanical design, allowing designers to define board dimensions, enclosure layout options and keep-outs earlier. And that means delivering a final design faster.

As the move to electric vehicles gathers momentum, automakers are evolving designs, manufacturing lines and business models. They’re asking more and more of suppliers as newer models go to market and production of older models winds down. How can suppliers handle these forces, and the pressures they create?

Look to the cloud. Onshape is the only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured CAD, built-in PDM and enterprise analytics in a single system. Its annual subscription model shifts costs from high capital expenditures to lower operating expenditures. The result? Reduced financial risk and more budget to help companies make adjustments to their business models.