Maverick was developed with Ford's Dynamic Driving Simulator which compresses months of testing to a single day

[huunvubu]

Ford's Dynamic Driving Simulator Compresses Months of Vehicle Testing Into a Single Day

Ford has invented a time machine of sorts. Rather than permitting time travel, Ford’s driving simulator allows time compression, with the device letting engineers perform months of real-world testing in a single day in the virtual world. “We can run ten times as many tests in a tenth of the time,” observed Louis Jamail, Vehicle Dynamics Core Methods and Simulation Supervisor at Ford.

Jamail used to work at Ford Performance, which used a simulator to improve the performance of Ford vehicles at the race track. Upon moving into vehicle dynamics, he sought to apply that same capability to production vehicles. That was in 2018. By 2021, Ford opened the Dynamic Driving Simulator in Dearborn.

“We were developing this on the racing side, and I saw huge potential to use it for mainstream product development at the same time,” said Jamail. The Dynamic Driving Simulator is larger and has a greater range of motion than the original motorsports simulator in Charlotte, providing increased fidelity.

“We started developing a process around building models and looking at how they compared to real vehicles, because the simulator is just your conduit into the [vehicle dynamics] model for a person to drive,” he said. That model is really what runs everything.”

Refining that model is how the simulator has become increasingly valuable to Ford. “We started building that foundation many years ago on how to create a process on building the model, correlating them, making sure they were growing and becoming more accurate as we learned more,” he said.

“Jumping through a few years, we had enough work and enough justification to build a facility in Dearborn, so that came online in 2021, and we, along the way, had already started developing programs,” Jamil explained. “Maverick was done on the simulator, Mach E, the Lightning, many, many vehicles had already been started going through that process.” It is also crucial for testing specific features, such as adaptive cruise control, lane centering, Blue Cruise, and Active Glide.

Once Ford reached the point where all of the vehicles it developed were tested in the simulator, then the process was to move the simulation earlier in the development process. “The earlier you can look at a vehicle in its totality and its parts, the better you're going to influence quality, performance, customer targets; all of those things,” said Jamail.

“You're then not having to wait to build cobbled prototypes to find out a suspension type or something else didn't work for the targets that you're setting. We can evaluate that stuff much earlier now. We can iterate through it at ten times the speed that we could by cobbling parts on a vehicle.”

And the simulator can instantly switch the parts being tested for comparisons, so mechanics don’t have to physically swap parts on real prototypes. Damage to vehicles is repaired by a simple reset, again, rather than having to fix a prototype.

It is also safer for the drivers, who can’t be injured in a real-world crash while testing. However, simulators are notorious for their ability to induce motion sickness in drivers using them. The Ford simulator has been able to minimize that effect, Jamail reported.

“Latency is a huge driver of motion sickness, so the lower that is, the better,” he said. “We went from probably 60% to 70% of people who were okay, so we had about 30-40% of the people who were starting to get a little bit queasy on the earlier version. We're probably well over 90 to 95% now, where nobody gets ill.”

The reduced latency that aids in the elimination of motion sickness also makes the experience more realistic for drivers. “In your vestibular system, everything that you use as a person to sense things, the faster that happens based on what you put into the simulator, let's say you steer, the faster that happens, the more real you feel,” he said.

Ford’s simulator not only accelerates time: it can also control the weather. This lets engineers test vehicles and systems under identical circumstances in the virtual world, regardless of changing temperatures or conditions in the real world. The proposed alternative parts can all be tested at the same simulated temperature. This presents another area where it is expanding its capabilities: inclement weather.
With the simulator providing such beneficial information already, the areas for improvement are in more challenging driving conditions, according to Jamail. “Probably our next frontiers are all what I would call the inclement weather or other conditions we're developing things now,” he said. “This hard pavement, what we call high-mu, is pretty darn good. So, what we're trying to explore and get into more and more are off-road, low-grip situations, things like that. I wouldn't call them limitations: they're more of the next hurdle.”

It is cool that this was used on the Maverick.

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[Surly Old Bill]

seems to work. I have close to 30k in just over a year of driving, and have yet to develop a shimmy, grind, or clunk anywhere. Tires seem to be about half done, though.

 

[Automan21]

So no real world testing. They have to do stop and go traffic for like 2 hrs straight. Pothole riddled streets/highways.

 

[pigsareus]

Ford's Dynamic Driving Simulator Compresses Months of Vehicle Testing Into a Single Day



It is cool that this was used on the Maverick.

too bad they don't have a tool to test out all of their software in a day or two and do the fixes and tweaking before it's released to the public and instead seem to rely on 'in production' faults and then take forever (if at all) to come up with resolutions.

 

[retiredmike]

seems to work. I have close to 30k in just over a year of driving, and have yet to develop a shimmy, grind, or clunk anywhere. Tires seem to be about half done, though.

They haven't decided about my "thump" at 12/13 mph when slowing down.

 

[babytruk]

too bad they don't have a tool to test out all of their software in a day or two and do the fixes and tweaking before it's released to the public and instead seem to rely on 'in production' faults and then take forever (if at all) to come up with resolutions.

The driving simulator software is more complex than the on-board software so good luck with that Ford!

 

[Randorita]

The software issues are because of the size of all the modules and how they have to work together. Lots of programmers work on them and some of them are careless. I worked for a data processing company and the night operators hated when 1 guy put a new program into production. He would always make stupid mistakes like not checking that his variables accepted only numbers and the whole thing would crash when a character got out into a number variable. It made the whole night late finishing. Today's gaming industry let's gamers test their software for them, after we buy it! Then we have to wait for them to fix it, hopefully! We are Ford testers, we just don't get paid for it.

 

[fallenleader]

i'm just glad they focus on important things like updating the siriusXM logo and adding karaoke!
both of which they're likely making money off of.

this might be useful for simulating different setups and designs but its nearly useless for real world longevity. you can simulate real world environments with an actual vehicle but simulating a vehicle won't sort out random systems failures.

at 7k miles had the turbo bathing the engine bay in oil, $3 gasket and 3 days in dealer with subframe dropped. at 17k have front end turning clunk but am not part of ball joint recall. yet?

 

[Cherokee]

I can only hope I never get a lemon or one of these trouble Mavericks.

Mines been perfect. I know several that have these,
Eco and Hybrid from 2023’s to 2025’s no one has had any issues.

 

[icegradner]

seems to work. I have close to 30k in just over a year of driving, and have yet to develop a shimmy, grind, or clunk anywhere. Tires seem to be about half done, though.

It obviously didn’t work, since 22-24 is notorious for having bad CV axles. Of course that could have been a supplier problem, not a design problem. Everything in the cab rattles, so they clearly didn’t get that very well in their simulator either.

 

[Tbone289]

Everything in the cab rattles, so they clearly didn’t get that very well in their simulator either.

Some of us don't have rattles in the cab believe it or not, so I'm not sure it's a design issue. Assembly maybe. It seems to me that the complaint of interior rattles has reduced over the years.

 

[MaverickDragon]

The simulator is used in the design phase to address issues and refine components to get the design right, rather than building a potential design and finding out it doesn't work as intended.
Pretty cool stuff.
It isn't a replacement or test facility for operational software, nor does it eliminate physical model testing.
What it apparently does do, is reduce design time by eliminating potential problems earlier in the design cycle.

 

[Surly Old Bill]

It obviously didn’t work, since 22-24 is notorious for having bad CV axles. Of course that could have been a supplier problem, not a design problem. Everything in the cab rattles, so they clearly didn’t get that very well in their simulator either.

I guess I got a Yubari King Melon compared to everyone else's lemons...

To be fair, I did notice a slight wind noise on my last high speed highway trip. It's NOTHING compared to the wind noise and rattling and shaking and clunking in my Transit(not Connect), but I wonder if Ford will give me my money back for the Maverick wind noise that I can hear if the radio is off?

 

[Surly Old Bill]

The simulator is used in the design phase to address issues and refine components to get the design right, rather than building a potential design and finding out it doesn't work as intended.
Pretty cool stuff.
It isn't a replacement or test facility for operational software, nor does it eliminate physical model testing.
What it apparently does do, is reduce design time by eliminating potential problems earlier in the design cycle.

As with many things, like medications and electric circuitry design, AI will likely iron out a lot of mfg and operation problems in the future. This rudimentary CNC simulator will seem like throwing a rock compared to shooting a gun when AI is fully utilized for design and mfg vehicles.

 

[HeyBales]

It obviously didn’t work, since 22-24 is notorious for having bad CV axles. Of course that could have been a supplier problem, not a design problem. Everything in the cab rattles, so they clearly didn’t get that very well in their simulator either.

Well - we need rest of the story after that testing.
Where's Paul!

Engineers - This hardware lasted this long in simulation without an issue.

Number crunchers - We can do a cheaper one then no problem.
We can use cheaper or fewer clips for assembly.

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