As I am beginning the search for a new family SUV to haul around my boys ever growing bags of sports equipment, I have been reviewing online stories and ran across an amazing story about the new Land Rover Discovery. I happened to have owned the first generation Discovery back in the 1990’s so it is always on my list when I go shopping. As I went through the standard information about how it is lighter, faster and all around better than the previous version, I stumbled on a quick note in the review that said all this was accomplished through over 12 million hours of simulation!
At NLS we specialize in digital simulation and we do thousands of hours of it every year. Even I was surprised at 12 million hours of simulation to get a new vehicle ready for market. The new Discovery is an amazing SUV as you can see from the these images of it in action.
The 12 million simulation hours is the new normal for product development. Between comfort, safety, performance and customer requirements, the customer expectations for new products is increasing and one of the keys to meeting these new expectations is simulation. Now in your industry the hours spent on product development may not be 12 million but it is probably not zero either.
This is an exciting time for new product development and digital simulation is going to be a big part of it moving forward.
2 thoughts on “12 Million Simulation Hours to Create New Land Rover”
Roger,
I am curious about the “12 million hours of simulation”.
There are 8760 hrs/year, (24 hrs/day x 365 days/yr).
12 million hours is over a thousand years, (12e6 hrs /8.7e3hrs/yr = 1.37e3 yrs)
So, did the design of the new Discovery begin in the year 647 CE, or is the simulation process massively parallel?
Thank you in advance for enlightenment.
Dan,
I love the math! Yes, it is a massively parallel process. Here at NLS we can set up a lot of different simulations and submit them to our servers and they will run in the background. Once a simulation job is complete the system will email us that the simulation is complete and ready for review. If a job is particularly complicated, we are now pushing jobs to the cloud where we can rent as many servers as we want and pay by the hour. Technology is awesome!