The AI-designed car is taking shape

The auto design world is full of advanced 3D visualization tools and VR sculpting platforms, but your average new car still enters the world as a sketch. The AI-designed car is taking shape Amidst a global maelstrom of trade wars and uncertain demand, automakers are leaning on AI to slash development times. Amidst a global maelstrom of trade wars and uncertain demand, automakers are leaning on AI to slash development times. Those sketches traditionally see endless iteration and refinement from all angles before being turned into 3D models by hand, some dying in the digital world, others sculpted into clay to better visualize lines and profiles. That’s just the beginning of a design and development process that often takes a half-decade or more. That means many new cars hitting dealerships this summer were first sketched in 2020 or 2021, initiatives kicked off when alternative fuel incentives were widespread, EV chargers were spreading like wildfire, and internal combustion’s days were numbered. Today, everything has changed. The Trump administration’s second act has quashed all sorts of EV incentives while slinging tariffs and import/export restrictions. Auto manufacturers that once pledged to go all-electric by the end of the decade are now shoving engines into anything that moves and factories are hurriedly being re-tasked to dodge the worst of the import restrictions. Amidst all that, we have the agentic AI boom, which an increasing number of manufacturers are leveraging to reel in that 60-month new car design and development window. As with most aspects of AI, the potential is huge. So, too, are some more disturbing ramifications. Design by prompt At GM, that new-car development process is getting an AI injection in the design phase. Dan Shapiro, creative designer at General Motors, walked me through the workflow, which always starts with a human design. “That’s what the sketches are for,” he said, “and AI helps us see it sooner.” By feeding hand-drawn sketches into a commercially available tool called Vizcom, Shapiro was able to create a fully realized 3D model and animation in hours, a process he said previously took “multiple teams multiple months.” Shapiro’s example was a concept car with aggressive lines that would have looked at home on the streets of Night City. Writing prompts like: “Create a dynamic view action shot of this Chevy concept vehicle... Empty elevated streets. Modern city,” he created a simple animation. Soon it was rolling across the sorts of perpetually wet roads that are de rigueur in a cyberpunk future. In some iterations, the vertical wheel covers disappeared, but a few prompt revisions and re-renderings quickly fixed that. For now, at least, these animations are only used internally as rolling mood boards to help GM’s teams see what works. And, Shapiro was adamant that it’s always the human designers shaping things, not the AI: “We’re still the monks deciding what feels like a Buick, a GMC, a Cadillac, and in this case, a Chevy.” But AI is having an influence there, too. Agents in the wind…