India's car manufacturers have spent decades accumulating engineering data across product cycles. Most of it goes unused inside organisational silos. That is beginning to change, says Thomas Heermann, Autodesk’s vice president for automotive and concept design, and Parminder Singh, head for autodesk's design and manufacturing business in india, in a freewheeling conversation with Anurag Chaturvedi & Shahkar Abidi.

How has the role of design evolved in the Indian automotive industry?

Thomas Heermann: India has a lot of history, with Tata and Mahindra. But really, seeing the design universe has been the new thing. Design in India has really grown a lot in the last 10 years, I would say 15 years, with really focusing not just on reliability and price but also on design. It is suddenly not about engineering anymore. Design is the difference.

The interesting thing I see is that each company is using this design opportunity in a completely different way. Some are really pushing the envelope on futuristic design. Mahindra, for example. The cars are pretty futuristic. Others, like Tata, are looking at their history, asking where their brand has been, bringing old ideas back to the market. We talk to scooter manufacturers as well. It is not just about fuel efficiency or safety. Design is becoming more and more important to differentiate, to get a brand on the street, to have people recognise you.

Parminder Singh: The customer is becoming very demanding because there are many competitors coming in. Startups are entering the market and raising expectations. For the large players, it is very important that they innovate and surprise their customers. When that happens, you need to continuously bring new things into your products at a very fast pace, which means you need to leverage technology very strongly. It is not only "make in India" but also "design in India," and that is where we come into the picture.

How is Autodesk integrating artificial intelligence into the design process?

Heermann: We have been looking at AI for four, five years already. There are two ways to look at it. How can we use this technology to help our customers do things faster, more efficiently, and have more information early? We do not see AI as a tool that takes people away or takes jobs away. We see it more as a tool that helps people do a better job or a faster job.

There are tools out there where designers can crank out amazing renderings, 200 a day, 300 tomorrow, 400 the day after. But that is not a designer's job, to create content. A designer's job is to find the right design. If you have a picture of a car that looks awesome, how do you know that your C-pillar does what you need? It is always a mixture of 3D modelling, sculpting, sketching, and not just another picture.

That is why clay modelling is still being taught. We went to a school yesterday, and they are still teaching it. Proportion has to be felt sometimes. That is why we still see clay models in car companies. Not because it is traditional, but because clay models help to visualise and to have the emotions attached.

Singh: Today in the automotive industry, you launch a product and after six months you do value engineering. There are huge projects where almost 15 to 20 members work on that. But imagine that with AI you can do the value engineering upfront. With human manpower you can look at maybe ten different options. When AI is there and you have cloud-based computing power, you can look at the complete design space upfront in the design cycle, identify the best optimum solution, and then drive your whole engineering process. What is happening after one year of launch can be done today, in the first place.

What about the use of AI in understanding aerodynamics early in the design stage?

Heermann: We have this product called Navasto. It takes CFD simulations done by engineering teams. It is an AI that learns from all these simulations. There is a plugin in Alias that allows designers to understand, in a second, how much drag a design has. Where to optimise, especially with EV cars, where every little drag change helps extend battery life. The biggest thing we see right now is how we can bring more information into the studio. In the past, a designer had to wait ten weeks for a simulation. Now it is there in two seconds. No designer is a CFD expert, but what can we do from CFD that is trustworthy, to help designers understand their decisions?

How is AI changing the way different departments within an organisation work together?

Singh: Usually in organisations, even though we may like to think they are all working together, it does not happen like that. What we are trying to do with AI is use the knowledge residing in the organisation for the last ten years. We use AI and machine learning to learn from that engineering data and make sure we can give it to different departments, which they can use to predict in advance. When I am doing something at the concept stage, a new design, I can look at past data of something similar and come close to 95, 98, 99 per cent confidence that this is what it will be. I can move ahead with my design and once I finalise, I can proceed with the engineering. In a normal environment, this brings a lot of delay.

Electric vehicle adoption has slowed globally. How does that affect automotive design, and do you believe EVs still have a future?

Heermann: I personally believe that EVs will pick up. There are some hiccups on the way, for political or geopolitical reasons. But EV is definitely the way to go. If you design for an EV platform, it is different from an engine. It gives designers the opportunity to do things completely differently. You can change wheelbases. There is a lot you can play with. We see customers really using that freedom to go bold. The Mahindra BE6, BE9 on the street, they look extremely futuristic. Then we have customers who do the opposite, who value their brand and say this is our DNA, our heritage, and it comes in EV, ICE and hybrid. Some really take advantage of separate EV and ICE lines. Others, especially the Germans, say you buy our brand car and you can get whatever drivetrain you want.

Companies that have had a long-term strategy on EVs, this will pay off. There have been companies who did EVs and are now walking away from them. But how many of these switches can you do? They are so expensive.

More broadly, how is the pace of automotive design changing?

Heermann: I think design is happening a lot faster now. In the past, a car had a life cycle of seven to eleven years. There is a lot of consumerization happening with cars. Faster rhythms, more refreshes. People are expecting more, and faster than they expected in the past. Brand DNA is becoming extremely important, from the outside and the interior. Not just looks, but the experience as well. What does a BMW look like? What does a Mahindra look like? What does a Bajaj look like? Customers really want to identify with their brands. Especially in India, you spend a lot of time in your car. Traffic jams. So the experience has to be there.

How important is the Indian market for Autodesk today?

Heermann: From my perspective, absolutely important. China and India are really emerging players in mobility. How can I judge what we do in the product if I do not understand my customers in these regions? That is why we pay a lot more attention in the last few years to be immersed here. We have great connections with the Volkswagens and the Porsches, but we want to establish this connection as well.

There is an opportunity to grow with these customers because they do things differently, which is exciting for me. How can we change our products, what can we learn? For me, it is a great source of inspiration on what we are going to build in the future. We have an amazing market share already. What makes me most excited is that mobility startups are also choosing our technology. It is really cool to see both established workflows running for decades and new people figuring it out.

Singh: For Autodesk, India is a strategic location. We have very strong growth in this region. In India, we have the largest research and development centre outside America. The leadership is investing in India as we move forward. India is also a very big consumption market. We have enough buyers within India. If you remove the ongoing turmoil from the picture, we are in a steady place. We expect the growth to be there and we are investing to address it, from a technology point of view, but also from a people and infrastructure standpoint.

India has a large base of smaller manufacturers. How open have they been to adopting new technology?

Singh: With the geopolitical environment of the last year and a half, and before that COVID, a lot of manufacturing has moved back into India. That has put pressure on MSMEs to deliver a higher-quality product. An organisation that was getting a mould from Taiwan or Korea now has to get the same thing done in India. Somebody has to deliver that quality.

I would say MSMEs have been open to change. A good example is plastic moulds. They need a very high finish and most of them were coming from outside India. A lot of that work got absorbed here in the last two to three years. Indian tier one suppliers went ahead, learnt the process, built the practice and developed capabilities in-house. When you are making a plastic mould, if you do not do the engineering properly you get shrinkages or defects on the final product. OEMs pass it on to the tier one supplier, who used to pass it on to someone abroad. But now they have all learnt the technology here. I find it very encouraging that a lot of companies are also coming to us wanting to explore how generative AI can work for them.

Data security is a growing concern in automotive design, especially with AI and cloud tools. How do you handle that?

Heermann: Trust is important for our customers, especially design studio customers. They want to trust us with their data. Some content will be in the cloud, in their own private areas. And some technologies we have, we do not put in the cloud. We give it to them so they can deploy on their own, with no data leakage beyond what they control.

With AI, it is very easy to use, but then how much of your data is getting used to train AI? Imagine we train AI based on our customers' data and everybody can use it. "Can we make the next Tata?" No way. We are very clear with our customers and extremely transparent. Their privacy and security is more important than us gaining advantage, especially around data. It sometimes makes us a little slower because we want to go the extra mile. Other companies go fast, and good luck to them.

How are you helping OEMs and their supply chains collaborate more effectively through the design and manufacturing process?

Singh: Any design may start from a sketch, but there is a whole village which comes together to deliver it. Today, automotive design is quite decentralised. You may have one design centre in Mumbai, another in Pune, another in the UK. Unless we provide a seamless connection between different departments, we end up with issues in product development.

Even tier one suppliers or startups may take concept design from someone else, do some work internally, then outsource manufacturing. It is very important that they can bring all these different stakeholders together and have a conversation around their bill of materials and change notices. We are even taking that to manufacturing. When they are deciding on various steps of the design process, we are helping them validate whether their existing plant and tools will work with whatever they are releasing. All of that helps reduce new product development time and the cost associated with it.

Heermann: Designers want to make changes at the last minute. If you have already made a die, that is tens of thousands of dollars. There is a lot of opportunity in collaborative engineering to allow those decisions later in the process. That is why designers care more and more about manufacturability than they ever have before. It is not about beauty. It is about making a good product.

You mentioned sustainability. How does your technology contribute on that front?

Singh: You can look at it in different ways. One is how we help customers reduce weight through AI, exploring the full design space but with manufacturing constraints applied. We are not going to give you a solution that cannot be manufactured. We take the volume and boundary constraints and come up with a design that can actually be produced. That is how we reduce weight.

Another way is that by connecting the dots, we reduce errors. Every error in an organisation is a cost. If you have made a tool which was wrong, imagine the cost and material that goes to waste. Then think about a new factory coming up. Any rework, any delay impacts sustainability. Imagine you have laid concrete or put up a pillar and it is not in line with what you wanted. Breaking it down and putting it up again is a sustainability issue. We are helping customers plan and visualise everything in advance so they do not make those mistakes.

Heermann: A factory is a building, it is the machines, the people, and the production. We have the opportunity to bring all of this together and remove the friction. I think we are the only company that can connect all these various disciplines together. That sustainability point is really about the larger loop. EV cars are great, but if you use coal to make the energy, what is the point? The whole loop has to be accelerated.