Opinion: is AI assisted car design the next big thing?

Although car design is a creative process, it’s also one that entails applied knowledge. Which is what AI is good at. 

By the way, in talking about design, I don’t mean the very creative process of visual design. It’s trivially easy to type ‘photo rendering of 2028 Porsche 911’ into the subject line of a generative AI. So it’s a shame cost-cutting bosses are now pushing skilled and creative humans out of their design studio jobs.

I’m talking about using AI for the engineering design. An early example is bio-mimicry. The shape of animal bones has evolved over millions of years to be the strongest and lightest possible for the job each has to do – even though they look nothing like the regular geometric shape of conventional structural members. So Mercedes trained AI software on zoological input, and it’s working on suspension arms.

Nowadays, AI is designing software too. The Xpeng G6 is claimed to operate by AI. Company founder He Xiaopeng says the software is “fed and trained” with information to develop its own understanding of traffic. And that AI software is itself coded by AI. In other words, human engineers are removed from the human driver by two stages of software.

Oh, so which AI model are you using to write the code? “Our own,” came the reply. It’s called XBrain. Hang on. Xpeng engineers have coded an AI that codes the code that assists the driver. Three layers of software between the human Xpeng engineer and the human customer. It’s looking increasingly like a leader in software design. The VW Group, having fallen behind in its China market software, is using Xpeng’s code as its future cars’ backbones there.

What does AI even mean in the context of assisted driving? Self learning, really, both at the vehicle level, and in the cloud, so in theory the car will get better over time. 

I do hope so. It might work well on Chinese roads, but in Kent the G6 I tested – a British spec one, ready for sale not a prototype – had a terribly clunky driver assist suite. It made sudden late and twitchy decisions, and wanted to steer a jerky path down the road. It sure needs to do some self learning. I’ll have another drive in a few months’ time and see if it has got any better. If so, that’s good for car buyers, even if it requires an extra piece of work for us road testers.