AUTO

Streamlining Vehicle Design: Toyota’s New AI Technique for Electrified Cars

July 31, 2023

A new AI technique from Toyota Research Institute combines engineering constraints with vehicle design, streamlining the process.
Using optimization theory and generative AI, TRI integrates precise engineering constraints like aerodynamic drag and chassis dimensions.
Designers can prompt AI to generate efficient designs, benefiting electrified vehicles with improved aerodynamics for BEVs.

Toyota Research Institute in Los Altos, California is helping its vehicle designers by giving them generative artificial intelligence tools to build the next generation of vehicles. Using text-to-image AI, designers are letting the technology begin the process. After the initial AI sketches, design engineers add their human touch.

Human Design Focusing on Human Needs

Generative AI technology saves money and time as designers no longer need to sketch and engineer at the earliest creative stages. Designers can spend more time on the future product because they are spending less time on the inspirational, creative opening stages. Human engineers can spend more time making vehicles safer, more efficient, and better suited for humans when AI technology takes care of time-consuming, mundane tasks.

_{The new generative AI technique optimizes aerodynamic drag in successive iterations based on parameter inputs from the designer.}

How Engineers Use AI in Car Design

Generative AI is not prepared for complex engineering, but the technology can inspire designers. The actual car design is in the hands of human designers, but they can get creative suggestions from ATI technology. The combination of human engineering and innovative AI capabilities is adding a new twist to the future of automotive design.

AI design can work with some physician considerations. For example, AI can factor formulas for drag into early design ideas to create virtual images of vehicles with better fuel efficiency and longer battery range. The technology can also work with chassis dimensions, which affects safety, ergonomics, and handling.

_{Vehicle design sketch incorporating the results of TRI’s new generative AI + optimization technique (courtesy of XD : Experimental Design Studio of Toyota).}

Speeding Up the Future of Transportation

For example, engineers can instruct the AI to create a vehicle that is compact, crossover, and athletic. Engineers can add a variety of metrics and parameters so the AI creates an early, realistic design. After the AI generates images of cars that fit the description and parameters, the engineers go to work.

Rather than using AI vehicle design to take work from the designers, it helps them do their work more efficiently. They spend less time on formulas and metrics, and more time on design elements, safety, efficiency, and other important factors. Using AI can speed up the time between research and development to market delivery.