Why Car Companies Still Spend Thousands On Clay Models _ Cars Insider

Every automobile you've ever seen once started as a full size carefully sculpted clay model .

Constructing these models can cost automakers hundreds of thousands of dollars per vehicle with major advancements in 3d imaging and virtual reality technology .

Why are automakers still investing so much money in giant hunks of clay to design their cars ?

Well , typically inside a clay model they have um it's just usually a steel frame with , with your wheel hubs attached to it .

And on top of the steel frame , it will um get , get blocks of foam glued to it .

And then from there we'll pack , you know , 1 to 2 inches of clay on that , which will be a machine um which then we start sculpting on or or or refining the design from there .

The details vary based on how intricate of a model it is still a full size clay model may feature $20,000 worth of materials and the hours of labor contributed by digital designers , sculptors and milling by C N C machines add up depending on how many adjustments are made to the model .

It can take a couple of years to finalize the origins of clay modeling can be traced back to General Motors in the 19 thirties , Harley Earl , head of G M styling studio was the first to turn sketches into full scale models using malleable clay .

It changed the industry by how much it simplified and sped up the design process .

Designers could now visualize shapes and forms that were difficult and time consuming to create in steel .

But in the 21st century , the age of all things digital , why is clay modeling still worth it as much as you can do on a screen ?

Digitally ?

Mathematically , it's still in essence a two D image .

So at some point in the process , very early on , we need a 3D image that we can see , we can touch .

Uh and we can evaluate proportion .

It's very difficult to evaluate proportions of a car on a screen .

And the thing is with the 3D model , you can't lie , there's no cheating .

It is what it is , what you see on a on the on the tube or on the screen .

Uh It might look great even in V R for example , but when you mill it out , there's always a lot of surprises .

For example , certain lines , you know on a on on a digital module , for example , they may look sweet , but when it's milled in full size , they might hang and the the proportions might look look wrong .

Like I say , you can't lie with 3D clay models can also be useful for aerodynamic testing in the wind tunnels where engineers evaluate a car's drag or how easily it passes through the air around it .

They're the perfect time saving tool .

Well , ultimately , you need to , to lower the drag coefficient , you know , particularly in an electric car , you know , the lower figure , the better , obviously , it's more efficient .

And the thing is with the wind tunnel , it's very expensive to rent per hour .

It's 1000 thousands of times sometimes .

So we do work on a clay model in the wind tunnel .

So we can quickly implement changes because time , time is money basically .

And al although we have computer models for a Dinas , we still need to double check to see if you can be 100% sure .

Perhaps most importantly , what clay models reveal that digital imaging doesn't is what the vehicle will look like in natural light .

One of the crucial tests is taking it outside where designers can see what the car will look like where it will actually be driving .

It's here that they can see how the sun bounces off of its curves and whether it looks like they imagine or just plain wrong .

This doesn't mean clay models are an ancient design method that hasn't changed decades ago when the entire model had to be developed by hand .

It could take weeks upon weeks to create a model to begin working with and testing today with C N C machines and data driven systems .

A detailed model can be milled overnight for sculptors to begin working on just like the entire car industry .

It's evolved to be faster in our design process too .

Like we make many variants quickly in data , in digital data and quickly review N V R um every single week .

Um But whenever we need a validation , we always mail it out again in play overnight and check it again .

If , if it needs some hand work , we do it quickly .

Despite how much quicker computers have made carving whole cars out , there's still an area where human modelers have the advantage , finesse .

Sometimes a detail on a car's body may need to be changed as little as a millimeter and edit like this can be tedious .

But using the malleable clay allows designers to visualize and make multiple changes with real world proportions .

Something a computer rendering can't compete with .

Even if digital technology continues to make car design less labor intensive .

Only clay models finished by human sculptors will help car companies achieve what they're aiming for .