This was a problem: as Frank Havasi, manager of the Neon Body-in-White program, said, “it was possible to take a design from computer to a clay model and discover that the surface was not linear.”Īt Lee Iacocca’s command, around a dozen design engineers were conscripted to be trained in other programs than the ones they knew, and then to compare them all.
Newer software could fill in the space between the graphed lines. What’s more, while CADCAM let engineers develop and manipulate objects on screen, they were based on wire-frames they could not accurately represent a true surface, because the space between the wire-frame lines were not mapped out. This had to be taken into account, and CADCAM did not do that. One need they discovered was to handle wear in cutting tools and such as time goes on, stampings and cutting tools wore and parts dimensions would change ever so slightly. Over time, the state of the art-and Chrysler’s demands-moved forward. But perhaps that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Finally, the software makes it easier to re-use parts and assemblies in other cars.
Software can be used to create virtual cars and test them in simulations, so fewer mules and prototypes can be built, saving time and money. The software can make sure parts fit together correctly, will survive hundreds of thousands of miles of driving, and allow for simulated assembly to avoid “oops, we can’t actually put this together” moments. Later systems could guide machinery to make parts-and, later still, 3D-print parts. Indeed, when Chrysler launched the Plymouth Scamp (L-body), they wrote that CADCAM had tripled productivity versus hand drawings.ĬADCAM and other systems could also measure body stresses, make sure different parts did not interfere with each other, and account for build tolerances.
This was especially true for projection of skewed views, which are not parallel to major drawing views (plan and front). Showing motion was difficult at best, and modeling wear on a part just wasn’t going to happen. It was also slow and errors happened despite great skill. Using computers rather than manually drafted images was both an economical boon and a gain in accuracy: manual drafting uses people to convert three-dimensional objects to two-dimensional images, and always had some guesswork. They developed software internally and kept using it, largely for chassis development and when people from their Huntsville aerospace group started migrating over to the automotive arena, they also used digital methods to improve aerodynamics for racing.Ĭhrysler’s CADCAM system was a major advance. Chrysler CADCAM and Dassault CATIA: Making cars with computersĬhrysler was the first automaker to use computers in body design-using them to help in the transition from body-on-frame to unibody construction, and to design of the 1960 Valiant.
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