Transforming Custom Car Design with British Supercar Manufacturer

ANTHONY GRAVES: All right. I'm going to use the mic since they're going to be recording this for posterity. But I want to thank everybody for coming out. I know this is probably the highlight of Autodesk University for everyone, 2022. It is for me, and the reason is, this is my 10th year reunion from becoming an Autodesker. I joined Autodesk back in 2012. They acquired a company I had. That was HSMWorks, which is now the CAM software inside of Fusion 360. And also, Inventor CAM and HSMWorks still lives today for another CAD application you guys have probably heard of, but I won't mention.

So I joined Autodesk and became part of the manufacturing software team and got to meet some of the folks in here today. But I got to meet Ian at my second Autodesk University. And this is a new car company, Briggs Automotive Company, out of the UK that had one of the most amazing cars that I had ever seen in my life. And all of my friends and I-- most of them still work here and still involved with CAM and Fusion and the manufacturing software-- all started taking photos. And we're hoping that Ian would walk away from the car so we could sit in it, but that never happened. And it was roped off, at least that Ian knows.

But we've maintained a long relationship ever since that first time that we met at Autodesk University. And a lot of people don't realize, but my old company, HSMWorks, all the way back to '04, we had started developing some technology that was multicore 64-bit. We were one of the first companies to do it, and we reached out to Intel and Microsoft to get some assistance as we were developing this software, which became the HSM CAM kernel.

And they put us in touch with the Z team at HP. So I've been working with them since '04, and then of course, I'm now part of the Z team. And I'm incredibly excited to have Ian here as our guest, and we just made a recent announcement about our relationship with Briggs Automotive Company and how we're collaborating to work together, along with Autodesk, to help them innervate the next generation of amazing technology that they're working on.

So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Ian. But I also have two guests that I'm going to introduce after his presentation. I think he has about 275 slides, so I need to stop talking. But we're going to have a Q&A panel with some other folks, friends of mine from HP and NVIDIA. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ian.

IAN BRIGGS: So that now this is meant to be everybody's highlight, I don't feel any pressure at all. Thanks for that, Anthony. Yeah. As Anthony says, I'm Ian Briggs at Briggs Automotive Company, which was formed in 2010 with my brother Neil and I. We came a slightly different route to our professions. I studied automotive design. My brother studied automotive engineering. Purely by chance, I was good at drawing, he was good at math and physics. We'd become infected in cars from our father.

And long story short, after working for Porsche, Mercedes, Bentley, Ford, with a design consultancy in 2007, we decided there was a car that we wanted that didn't exist. We recognized the way the car industry was moving and the transport industry, and we saw it was going further away from-- well, we saw it going further away from what it was we were after. So we decided to start a design project, which originally may only have been an acquisition project for our design and engineering consultancy, but which then grew into Mono, which I'll come to in a minute.

What I'd like to do, though, is, first, it's a very-- I always struggle to explain what the car is about. I wish there was a different word for a car because, traditionally for us all, we see the car as being a mode of transport. And so the first part of the presentation kind of puts it into context. I'd like you guys to really understand what this vehicle is really meant to be and how it's to be conceived and perceived within the car industry.

And then, I'll show some of the unique features that that creates, that concept of vehicle, some of the unique challenges, some of the unique opportunities, and how we address them. And we'll go through there. There isn't 270 slides, so don't worry. But you are going to see some pictures you're probably not expecting to see. So that's probably the first one.

To understand Mono in context, once upon a time, the horse was transport. It's how everybody got around. And when we were using the horse for transport, we were considering practical things, versatility, its toughness. It had to do lots of different jobs. What happened? The car replaced it. And of course, once the car replaced the horse as a means of transport, that didn't stop the horse existing.

The car replaced the horse because it was door-to-door transport. It did it in a quicker way, a more efficient way, kept you dry, kept you warm. So for lots of reasons, it was a better way of getting from A to B. It was a better way of getting around than riding a horse. What happened to horse riding? Well, as we all know, it became a leisure activity. Today if someone has a horse, it's because they enjoy riding horses. And in that sense, the types of things you do with your horse require different specialization as when it was actually a means of transport.

For example, horse jumping, horse racing, polo, these are all different types of horse riding, and they all require a slightly different more focused product. Within this context, you could imagine someone saying, well, that horse isn't really very useful as transport anymore. Well, no, it's not. It's now been superseded. Its function is something different.

This is a great example of that. The bicycle was originally conceived as a mode of transport. You have practical things. You'll have mudguards. You'll have a little place to carry some luggage. It might have an integral bike lock. There'll be things done to it to make it very good as a means of transport.

But bicycle riding is also a leisure activity, and with the leisure activity comes a specialization. And you see these two bicycles here. The one on the left is aerodynamic, super efficient. Everything is about the aerodynamic function. The one on the right, the downhill bike, it's all about rugged, suspension, travel, nothing to do with aerodynamic functions. So once the product becomes something to be used as a leisure activity or as a sport, then the specialization starts, and it gets more and more focused at that specialist function and obviously has less and less to do with the transport function.

Here's another fantastic example. The sailboat was a way of crossing oceans In the past. And nowadays, almost everybody who sails a boat is doing it as a leisure activity. Skiing is exactly the same. Again, a way of crossing open spaces covered in snow, frozen lakes. And the ski today is, people go to the top of mountains literally just to slide back down for the fun of it.

So the point I wanted to make there is that things that start out as transport, very often once they become superseded, they become leisure activities, and there comes a focus. So what is the future of the car? What was the future of the car that we identified? We see it as two completely separate markets that will spread out as we get more and more specialization. One of them is the car as transport, which I'll just briefly touch on because I think it's obvious to us all what's going to happen. And then the car as a-- or driving, I should say, as a leisure activity.

So again, just to reiterate, the car as transport, why it's convenient. It's door-to-door. It's your personal space. It follows your schedule. And the things that are happening in the world with autonomous driving and electric driving, they're just going to make it better at its transport function. The idea that I can work while the car drives itself. The idea that I can sleep, be drunk, watch a movie. I can do anything in that car, and it becomes a better car for transport, where wealthy people have, for years, had chauffeurs. And so that shows you that that will be a better car at being a means of transport when it's autonomous, electric, for all the obvious reasons too.

And the other point is, when we start you start to think, I can subscribe to a car, I can pull up a car on an app, I'm not even driving it anymore. If I just need a one or two seat car to get to work in the morning, or I need something to go on holiday with a family, I can really focus on that, and I can just call up the car I want. But then, of course, what do people do who enjoy driving cars as a leisure activity? They enjoy being in control of the machine.

So this is just a quick graph I just put together for this presentation. So if you see along the bottom, there's transport, so pure transport, London Bus, nothing to do with transport Formula One car. And we've just kind of just got this product layout. There's more about this later. We'll talk about some future product ideas. But that's where Mono is. Mono is nothing to do with transport, and it's all focused on performance. It's focused on driving as a sport.

So this is the original car. This was March 2011 when we first launched the car. And over the first 10 years, we developed that car. It stayed very similar in its aesthetic, but it was optimized below the skin, more power, better brakes, lighter. It was continually improved.

And then the second generation car, which is a car you'll see downstairs on the Z by HP stand, is this car. This is Mono R. The original car was just under 600 kilograms. This one's now 555 kilograms. World's first car to use graphene in its body, so all the carbon panels use carbon fiber prepreg with graphene. Carbon wheels, carbon brakes, carbon everything.

And what's it for? Well, it's for the adventure. It's for driving as a leisure activity. And along with that comes a specialization. Obviously, if it was driving off road, it would look different, but Mono is about high performance driving on the road, on the track. And I love this picture just because there's a guy out there on his road bike, and he's got all the helmet and these low drag clothing, all lycra. And he's got his low drag road bike, and he's out riding. And he's focused on his leisure activity. And here's a Mono doing exactly the same in his product. I would love to find a different word other than car.

It's obviously about the absolute focus on driving as a leisure activity, gives you ultra high performance. I'll come to that a little bit in a minute. And with this specialization, with the specialization of its function, comes real clarity, a real focus. So this is the package of the car. Let me see how this works. There we go.

So we're trying to condense all the main mass of the vehicle into the middle. Ultimately, talking kind of theoretically, what you would really like would be all the mass to be right in the middle on the floor and nothing else to weigh anything. Obviously, that's impossible. But the two biggest elements in the vehicle, from a weight point of view, are the engine and the driver. So they're here, and in between them is the fuel tank. So we don't change our center of gravity between a full or an empty fuel tank.

We put the engine directly behind him in line to reduce frontal area, which we'll come to. Gearbox is directly behind that. And everything, this is all structural elements, which the rear suspension is mounted onto, gives us a lower frontal area. Again, I'll come to that. Gives us a great suspension kinematics because we've got lovely long suspension arms, which give us great wheel articulation. Batteries, fire extinguisher, things like that, are all underneath the driver's legs, so we're trying to keep all the mass to the center.

The best place for cooling is right next to the engine. We don't want to send water all the way to the front and all the way back. We'd be carrying a lot more weight. And we don't want to put the coolers at the front as well because then that weight isn't concentrated around the center. So the point is that when you can focus on the function of the vehicle, and it is for driving as a leisure activity, it becomes much easier to make decisions.

I admire the guys in Porsche and Mercedes. You know, you've got to make the car suit so many different people, whereas we have a really, really clear focus on who the vehicle's for. And so what it is we try to do, this clarity of function, we're trying to reduce weight. The best place to reduce weight is the tire. There's no better place on the car than the tire. It's unsprung weight. It's as far away from the center of the vehicle as possible, and it's as far away from the center of the axle, so it's rotating unsprung mass.

Then it's the wheel. We're the world's first carbon aluminum hybrid wheel, so the rim of the wheel is carbon fiber, and the center section is forged and then machined from solid aluminum center. Carbon brakes. So again, this focus, this clarity, it becomes very clear what challenges you need to try and address. We're trying to reduce weight. We're trying to move that weight towards-- oops, sorry. Wrong button.

We're trying to reduce weight and move it to the center. And once we've got it on the center line and as low as it can go, now we're trying to move it towards the driver or from the front back towards the driver. We're trying to get all the mass of the vehicle here, and that pays you back in spades when it comes to performance, which I'll come to later as well.

This is what I was mentioning about earlier with low frontal area. People talk about the drag coefficient of a car, 0.25, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5. But it's only really half the story because that coefficient of drag has to be multiplied by the frontal area of the vehicle. And so on one hand, exposed suspension, which we have, isn't ideal for drag. We use aero profiles, but it's not ideal. But what we also have is a very, very low frontal area. And so we have an extremely low drag, although our drag coefficient is relatively high. But when it's times by its frontal area, the drag the engine actually feels is low.

One of the things which I personally have always loved about the single seater, if you imagine, as a person sits in here, we can't have anything less than the outline of a person, and we've got the outline of a wheel. We can't do anything about that, so what we try to do-- if I just go back to the other slide-- we try and put everything within the outline of the driver or the headlights in front of the front wheels, the rear lights behind the rear wheels, the engines behind the driver, the gearbox. Everything is within that frontal area of the two elements, which I have to have, which is the driver and the wheels.

Then what does it deliver? I don't want to sound too kind of self-congratulatory, but this was a lap record. We did it with Pirelli. It was a Pirelli event. It was all the manufacturers came to it. It's the Red Bull ring in Austria, and all the companies are supplied with Pirelli tires. The lap record was held on road tires by the LaFerrari, a 2.5 million euro car, and we beat it by 6 seconds with Mono. That's not because we're better than Ferrari. It's because our product is focused on just performance. It doesn't have any other transport function. So it does deliver you extra performance and extra focus.

The other thing that we're able to do because of our low volume, this is a sheer plate, which I'll show you in a second an image of. Because we make about 30 cars a year at the moment-- we're looking to go to about 50 next year, one a week-- we can't afford to be spending hundreds of thousands on tooling. We don't make enough cars to repay that tooling anyway. So we end up looking at methods of manufacture, which are traditionally a high piece price but a low investment in part price.

So this is a CNC machined from SOLID. Traditionally, that wouldn't be affordable for someone like a Porsche or Ferrari or making thousands. But for us making 20, 30, 40, then it becomes affordable. And what that does for the customer, it means he gets the ultimate lightweight part, real work of art stuff. This is the pedal box, which is all adjustable to the driver. The position of the pedals, the angles, where it is in the car, it's all focused on the driver, and I'll come to that later.

But that's what low volume and use in this method of manufacturing allows us to do. This is all modeled in Inventor. From day one, we worked with Inventor on our engineering, and we used Alias for our service. And I wanted to mention that earlier actually. So within this world of kind of, let's call it high piece price, low part investment, we're also able-- I think one of the first companies to be doing 3D printing for the production car.

So there's 45 3D printed parts. We use two different materials. All the blue parts are printed with PA12 on a HP machine. All the red parts are called DSM NOVAMID CF10. It's a carbon fiber reinforced filament deposition type machine that we use for that. The red parts are kind of structural, and that's so things like the mirror arms, the inlet runners into the engine, you've got some of the latch here for the front hatch. So some of those structural elements. And then some of the more cosmetic elements, the mirrors, the headlights, things like that, they're done with the HP printed machine.

And what it allows us to do is we can put the car number. So we're making 40 of this limited edition car at the moment, so each car is numbered. The car you see downstairs, R02, so many parts have got that R02 designation. We can put the customer's name on, should we wish. And this leads later to what I'll come to, which is about how we're bespoking the car for the customer.

But at this stage, we had a challenge, for example, on the front headlights. We all know what the supply chain's like at the moment in most industries. We had 152 week lead time on an LED headlight, which obviously is ridiculous, so we had to make some changes. Had we invested in injection molded tooling, had we been able to afford it, it wouldn't have been very easy to make changes. But because it's a printed part, we can change a CAD model, and the next set of parts we print work. So it allows us to be very flexible, constantly improve the part, make the part lighter, make it bespoke for the customer.

So I'll just go into a little bit into this bespoking process. How am I doing for time, by the way?

ANTHONY GRAVES: You're good.

IAN BRIGGS: We're good. So the customer is effectively buying-- when he buys a BAC Mono, he's buying a made-for-him suit. The process starts with a consultation phase. We're trying to understand what it is he likes. We're trying to actually find out more what he doesn't like. It's much easier to find the things they don't like than what they like. They don't know what they like ultimately. So we have mood boards. We use a lot of these different methods in trying to understand. Do they like sporty, science fiction? What is it they look? You'll see some of the cars we've created from this in a minute.

And obviously, then we start the design phase, and we start looking at some of the inspirational images. This was an inspirational image this particular customer gave us. He was a fan of the original Playstation game Wipeout. And so we started looking at how we could give that look to a BAC Mono, working through how various elements of the car could look. And we start to show these to the customer. And traditionally, they were just PDFs that we'd just send some images. Then we'd start making the car.

Here you can clearly see, just stepping back from before, that's really essentially the main part of the vehicle. And that's just an aerodynamic wing shape in plan view, and then you've got the pharynx over each of the four wheels. So you can see how easy it is for the air to flow through.

Each car is completely one off, unique, painted car. The seat's molded to the driver, so it really is like a made-to-measure suit, in fact, more so. So we'll ask him how he plans to use the car. Will he-- oops? Will he be wearing race suits? Will he wear normal clothes? Is he driving in a t-shirt? How does he plan to use the car?

And the same question we ask when it comes to steering wheel. The steering wheel, we mold it. We use the clay, which we've used to develop the car in the first place in the studio. When it's warm, you can squeeze your hands into it with or without gloves, depending on how he's planning to use the vehicle. And then we scanned that, and we 3D print those hand grips as well. So again, 3D printing opens the door to us to have something really unique for the customer.

That's an example of the finished result. And that was the Wipeout car we did. That was R01, so that was the first Mono R model. The car downstairs is R02. Some of them are quite simple, as the car downstairs is. Some of them are crazy like this one.

So just quickly, anyone else who saw this presentation last year will have seen some of these images before. But this was how we presented the car to the customer in the past. This is the old generation car. But you see they were just non-raytraced, no self-illumination. They were OK, and they gave the customer a decent idea of what his car would look like using stock environments. They weren't really photorealistic, but they were OK. And at the end, he got a PDF with some images, and then we'd go through the design loops.

The interaction today is more involved. Let's see if this works. The presentation gets too hard, too heavy, if I put too many videos in. But we can now give him 3D videos of his car in different environments. This was a car that actually the customer wanted the blue lines to glow in the dark, believe it or not. And now, you can see the images are much more sophisticated. I mean, these are slightly arty shots for this presentation, but you can see that the textures of the matte and the gloss, it's a much more realistic view. And the customers find it easier to make decisions about how their car is going to look.

Being able to show it in different environments as well is a great feature. And without plug-in HP too strong, this process used to take us one or two evenings of machines, just creating images, creating images. And this type of image now takes us minutes. The videos, we've got slightly greedy now. We're trying to do raytraced videos, so they're taken overnight again. But the capability, the way we're able to depict the car, now has really changed. This self-illuminated surfaces-- there's some more of them later-- showing the dash, showing the cockpit at night, is great.

We now move into more realistic environments now as well, outside environments. This environment is actually very similar to our showrooms. This is how we lay our showrooms out. So that's why this particular car is shown in that. But these are all just unique cars. That's R21. That's why it's got a 21 on it. So that's what that customer wanted. That's actually a neon red. It's very hard to show obviously in an image.

But you see the level now between the different matte and gloss surfaces. And it's really been transformational for us. We are getting greedy. We want everything raytraced now. This particular customer, he said, every time I stop for gas, everyone's asking me how fast is it, Mr. and what does it weigh? He said, so can you please put it on the side of the car so they can read it?

[INAUDIBLE] saw how many slides he was on, that was how long it would take.

There's a different, another example. But again, you just really get a sense of the-- Mono is a play between matte technical surfaces and organic smooth surfaces. And this contrasted in gloss to matte, which I always prefer when this is a lighter color. But anyway, it can really be brought out with this level of-- sorry, I should say, we use VRED. So Alias for our design services, Inventor for our engineering, and VRED for our visualization.

And so now, he still gets a PDF, but he's going to get videos, he's going to get the original mood images, and he'll get a much more thorough, much more involved presentation of exactly how we've got to his car. Eventually when his car is made, he'll get a build book, which will show the whole design phase. It will show the whole car. We have a professional photographer in house that takes pictures every Friday, so his car being built over the 6 to 8 week period, in the paint shop, being assembled. And he'll get the whole thing when his car's delivered.

Just quickly, one of the things we'd like to move towards, one thing we're already doing in design department, is using the reverb headset, the VR experience. This is a car I'll come to in a second. I'll tell you a little bit more about that. But that's something we're doing what. We did, for a second, wonder about sending headsets to customers and let them see the car. And we've decided-- there's a product from Autodesk now, VRED Go, and that's something we're interested in.

And I know we've been talking earlier, haven't we, about other ways of achieving the same thing. Our dream would be that when he gets a file, a link to a server or something, and he can walk into his garage or his driveway and he can just look at the car that we've designed for him. And he can see it, and he can interact with it. Walk around it and give us the design go.

This is back to what we were talking about earlier a little bit, the product positioning. So that was the original product positioning, that chart you saw. This next slide that's coming up is really just this area, and it's what we see as being the future for BAC, and it's the future for driving as a leisure activity for us. This is that area, about as practical as you might expect. Oops, sorry.

As practical as you might expect. Might be something you'd consider, kind of like a hardcore traditional supercar. That's about as transport focused as we would ever imagine being. And these are all just example products that we could imagine will be future products for BAC. We definitely see the off-road environment. Once you start driving as a leisure activity, it's track. It's off road. It's getting harder and harder obviously on the public road.

This is something else that's in our future. Obviously, we're often asked about electric. One of the challenges with a 550-kilogram car is you put batteries in it, and it suddenly becomes a 1-ton car. The lightest cars around, the Formula E race cars, are 900 kilograms, and they'll just about do a 30-minute race. That's not a product we can sell as of today. So we've done a lot of studies and a lot of simulations. We can't get that vehicle anywhere close to the performance and certainly not from the driving feel.

But this is a fuel cell electric vehicle. We've got down to 690 kilo with this, and we've got more performance than the original car. So we're a little bit heavier, but we've got four-wheel drive and the talk of the motors. We're able to make it slightly more aerodynamic as well towards the rear. And there's just some of the facts. It's going around Silverstone 2 seconds faster than the current car, and that then becomes interesting for us. Now obviously, who knows what's going to happen in the future? I see it very much as the old battle between VHS and Betamax. Which one is going to win? Some of you aren't old enough to know what that means probably. Some of you are though.

But the great thing about a fuel cell is it still has a battery, and it still has electric motors, and it still has electric motor controllers. If it turns out that all the fuel companies say, right, you're going to be able to buy hydrogen on a gas station all over the country by the end of the year, we're ready. And if it turns out someone discovers a really super dense energy battery, we just take the fuel cell out and make a slightly bigger battery, and we're there as well.

So we see it as a way to start researching how we can do things like torque vectoring-- we have two separate electric motors at the rear to each wheel and the front as well-- and how we can expand with torque vectoring and the control and stability control and all these different things, and have a product that could be a conceivable product for a customer. It's not inconceivable that you can have a trailer, for example, where you have a storage of hydrogen in the car. But let's see.

Anyway, I think that was long enough. Thank you very much, everybody, for your attention.

ANTHONY GRAVES: I don't know who doesn't love that car. That's amazing. Let me get up here before I get some feedback. By the way, my name is Anthony Graves. I forgot to mention that at the very beginning. I'm going to introduce a couple of guests.

The first is Barbara Marshall, who is my compatriot here on the Z team at HP. I don't know if she mentioned it to some of you in the beginning, but she was managing Media and Entertainment, AEC, and Product Design and Manufacturing by herself until they found me somewhere inside of HP. And they didn't have to convince me to join the team. It was a dream job when it opened up. So I wanted to introduce Barbara.

And then also Himanshu-- from NVIDIA-- Iyer. He is in charge of the manufacturing market globally for NVIDIA, and Barbara is also the global lead for AEC now.

BARBARA MARSHALL: M&E.

ANTHONY GRAVES: And M&E. Let's see.

BARBARA MARSHALL: Do you want to use this one?

ANTHONY GRAVES: Yeah, let me grab that real quick. Thanks. Check. OK.

For M&E primarily, and I'm still going to make her help me with AEC for a little bit. So I want to start off with a couple of questions, and I'm going to switch places here with Ian.

BARBARA MARSHALL: Do you want to grab a chair and--

IAN BRIGGS: I can do it.

ANTHONY GRAVES: Yeah, if you want to go ahead, and you guys want to have a seat. So the first question I have is for Ian, and that is, do you guys offer tours of the facility?

IAN BRIGGS: Yeah, and you've had one.

ANTHONY GRAVES: Yeah, I know. I've been there. I thought I was special.

IAN BRIGGS: Anyone who's interested is welcome. Give you a little bit of warning, but more than happy to show people around. We enjoy talking about what we do definitely.

BARBARA MARSHALL: I have a cheeky question.

ANTHONY GRAVES: Yeah, go ahead.

BARBARA MARSHALL: You kept talking about "he," "his car."

IAN BRIGGS: I know. I've been criticized--

BARBARA MARSHALL: I'm sitting there going, excuse me, some girls like cars.

IAN BRIGGS: I know. I know. We've got sold about 200, but we've built about 150 of them so far. Got one female.

BARBARA MARSHALL: I was going to say, have you had any female customers?

IAN BRIGGS: Our PR guy said exactly the same to me before I came here. So--

BARBARA MARSHALL: You might sell more to girls if you include them.

IAN BRIGGS: I know. I know. I know. I know. I apologize for that.

ANTHONY GRAVES: Sure. So one of the questions-- Ian and I have known each other for a long time, and one of the challenges that Ian has is the same challenge that most of us have had. Even when I had a software company or two, I had the same challenge. And that was, how do you spec out a workstation or a mobile workstation?

And I wanted to ask that question to both Barbara and Himanshu because, I can tell you, I haven't had an experience with a PC other than HP and NVIDIA. But it's more to it than the brand. It's what goes inside of the box. So Barbara, if you want to take the lead on that.

BARBARA MARSHALL: Sure. Yeah, I mean, the trite answer is, it depends what you're doing. What software are you using, and what are you doing? It's very different if you're doing concept design than if you're doing generative design and simulation or a high end rendering.

But generally, I would say, there are four key components to consider. It's your CPU, it's your GPU, your memory, and your storage. And your software is going to determine what combination. But just to give some scale and ideas, if you're doing modeling, if concept design, chances are your software is single threaded. So the number of cores is not really the issue. It's the clock speed that matters. But if you're doing visualization and simulation, chances are a lot of those softwares are now GPU accelerated and require or can benefit from high end GPUs.

And so some of our machines, like the Z4 and the Z8, you can get two GPUs in there. So the VRED, for example, down in the booth, we've got a Z4 running the VRED, or Vred, or however you want to pronounce it. And that's utilizing two high end NVIDIA RTX A5000s so we've got in there. So it's a long answer, but that's because there are a number of considerations when building your machine.

HIMANSHU IYER: Yeah, thank you.

ANTHONY GRAVES: I think we've got to turn back on the [INAUDIBLE] There you go.

HIMANSHU IYER: All right, yeah. So Barbara answered part of the question. She covered some of the CPU requirements when it comes to rendering visualization type of workflows. But a couple of other workflows that Ian mentioned, he's looking into AR/VR and providing an immersive experience to his customers, so that is also where you need these high end GPUs. That is really going to take that into a next gear, next level, of experience for the customers.

And more importantly, Ian also mentioned how simulation is an important part of their workflow. They do structural simulations, fluid dynamic type of simulations. And a lot of these simulation CA tools are now GPU accelerated, specifically from a computational fluid dynamics point of view.

So what used to take several hours or days on CPUs can now run within hours or even within minutes, based on what type of simulation you are doing, on GPUs. Because the CFD solvers are very heavily paralyzed, GPUs are much better to run these simulations. So it's not just rendering and visualization when it comes to GPUs, but also if you are doing simulations and such, they play a big part in the workflow.

ANTHONY GRAVES: I want to try this mic one more time here. I think I have to turn it off and let it build up some juice. When Ian and I were talking about how to outfit their facility in Liverpool, which is where the home base is located, I mean, it took us-- it was over a month of going back and forth and auditing all the software applications they were using, looking at what the minimum requirements were, looking at what workloads they were putting each of those applications through, to try to determine what devices each of the engineers and some of the more creative folks there needed.

And it's a challenge, and that's why I asked the question, because we just launched-- the Z team launched something called a product finder, and it's on the Z website, hp.com/z. It's the first step, which is going to be a long journey, trying to help people answer that question. Because we have certifications on there, particularly around NVIDIA graphics cards as well, which is very important. So if you want to see if there's a certified card, you can do that.

But it's designed to get you in the ballpark, because if you just go to the store and start trying to configure a device, you're sort of sticking your finger up to the wind. So don't think you're the only one that has that challenge. Like I said, Ian and I took 30 days to go through that. I want to see if there's a question from--

HIMANSHU IYER: I think one more thing to add to that, Anthony, something you touched upon is, we come up with these good, better, best type of recommendations. So again, based on what type of applications you're using, what workflows you're using, on the HP side, there is a good, better, best recommendation that you can refer to for your applications and workflows.

ANTHONY GRAVES: Sure. Questions from the audience? Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: For Ian. Thank you. Just curious what the size of your design team is. How many modelers do you have? Is it dedicated modeling [? NVIDs ?] or separate groups?

IAN BRIGGS: We're four designers, including me, and four engineers actually, including my brother, Neil. Most of what design does is Alias and VRED, and obviously most of what the engineering team do is in Inventor. And then some of the simulation, some of which is done outside. And we do have a class A Alias modeler for when we're about to make a tool to carbon part or something.

So we'll get it to the point where we can visualize it, and we're happy with it, and we know we're good. We can even print one, make sure we're completely happy with it. And then that very final-- you know, it's a real skill in itself getting that perfect mathematical shape with all the conics and all the fillets done right. So we've got one external guy who we use for that because that's not a full time role that we need. But four and four.

ANTHONY GRAVES: And if there's another question, I could repeat it too, if my mic works. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: So I know that this engine is normally aspirated. It's got a really interesting RAM intake system that pressurizes the intake charge. What did you utilize in order to create pressure to the normally aspirated engine?

ANTHONY GRAVES: So the question is about the air intake on the car for Ian.

IAN BRIGGS: Yeah, it's been called many things, rocket launcher. And I've had lots of comments. Why don't they put one on both sides and things like that, so there's been all kinds of comments about that. The truth of the matter is the original car, we took in air above the driver's head, but you end up with a very slightly tortuous route.

We're trying to keep the area behind the driver's head within the silhouette of his helmet. Obviously, he's got to cover the roll structure, so we're trying to keep that as slim as possible. And to take that air and then get it to the side of a four-cylinder engine meant we were compromising the induction track. You end up with your air coming behind your [INAUDIBLE]

So we took a leaf out of the Formula Three book. We put the air box on the left hand side. I remember asking the engine builder how big a volume does this air box need. He said, it needs to be as big as the Albert Hall. It can't be big enough as far as they're concerned. But the engine builder is not concerned about vehicle drag.

So it's really a balance of the drag of the system and what it gives the engine. And so at full throttle, anything over about 100 miles an hour, we're giving the engine a bit more air than it can ingest. So we're getting positive pressure inside there instead of negative. And we estimate, dynamically, we get between 6 and 8 horsepower extra as a result of it.

We also get better mid-range because there's a big volume of air at the engine that's already come through the filter. So when you first give throttle, you've got a really quick reaction. And this is a limited edition model. It's the last normally aspirated we'll probably do. And so I know it's a bit-- I don't know if you guys know what Marmite is. It was a food type in England, which you either love it or you hate it.

And I'm cool with that. I don't mind the fact that some people think it looks mad and some people love it. That's OK on a limited series car, I think, and it will always be connected with the aesthetic of that car in 5 or 10 years time as one drives past. Oh, that's an R because it's got that air box, you know.

ANTHONY GRAVES: By the way, if you want to see the detailed, we have the entire model down in the booth. So you can come down there, you can check it out. We have it in Inventor. We have some of it in Fusion, I think the wheel that was generatively designed.

IAN BRIGGS: Yep.

ANTHONY GRAVES: And they're working on a new model that he has some highlights to. You can check that out downstairs. And then of course, we have the visualization and rendering in VRED, Fred, or Vred. And I called some of my friends at Autodesk and ask them because I said vee-red, and I was castigating by some of our tech team. And I said, what do you call it? And it took an hour to get a response.

And the official response was, people call it vee-red if you're old, which is what I always called it. And most people call it Vred, but apparently the people that developed the software call it Fred, out of Germany. So I don't know which one is right. So just take your pick.

IAN BRIGGS: It's because of how they pronounce the V as an F.

ANTHONY GRAVES: Exactly.

IAN BRIGGS: And it was a German software originally.

ANTHONY GRAVES: So if you want to be cool, call it Fred, and everyone will say, eh, this guy.

I do have a question from something I just realized about the graphene. Why graphene? What does that do? What's the advantage to building that into the carbon fiber?