Ford Leverages AI to Accelerate Vehicle Design

Ford is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) agents to expedite the design and engineering of new vehicles, aiming to match the rapid innovation cycles of its competitors, the Wall Street Journal reports. Bryan Goodman, Ford's director of AI, highlighted the need to accelerate the design process.

"I personally think that Ford engineers as good of products as anyone in the world in automotive. But I think we have to speed up to be competitive. I look at the Chinese [original equipment manufacturers] and their engineering cycle times are quite fast," Goodman told the WSJ.

Ford's current design process involves sculpting physical models from clay, followed by extensive simulations and stress tests, a time-consuming approach. Goodman explained that while clay models remain valuable, AI can automate and accelerate key aspects of the design process.

Ford is utilizing a range of AI models from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek. The company is also upgrading its data centers to accommodate the next generation of Nvidia GPUs.

"The designers sculpt 3D vehicles in this red clay, but it’s very time consuming. They like to sketch, but that’s two-dimensional. By using AI, we can turn [those sketches] into three-dimensional models and renderings and connect that with engineering," Goodman explained to the WSJ.

Ford is training AI systems to predict stresses and conduct various physics-based tests, significantly reducing the time required for these analyses. For example, a computational fluid dynamics test that previously took 15 hours can now be completed in 10 seconds using an AI model.

The company is also leveraging AI agents, which string together various AI tasks.

"When we string them together: so the agent might be rendering and then creating a 3D model and then doing a stress analysis on it. That’s where I view this as agentic," Goodman stated.

Ford is using a diverse array of AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and open-source options. The company has also incorporated AI models from Meta and DeepSeek, a Chinese company.

"We have found it’s very good. But I don’t see it as being any better than the latest Anthropic and [Google] Gemini and OpenAI models. No better or worse. The really nice thing, though, is that it is open source. And because they shared everything with the world, I think we’re going to see a lot built on top of it," Goodman said.

Ford is running most of its AI computations on its own Nvidia GPUs, citing the high cost and availability issues associated with cloud-based GPU compute.

"We run most of that on our own GPUs. We have Nvidia GPUs. We have a few thousand. Five, six years ago, we moved everything to the cloud, except high-performance compute. GPU compute in the cloud has been crazy expensive and also just difficult to get. I don’t blame them for charging that much. Sometimes it just wasn’t available. It’s like Taylor Swift tickets. We’ve been fortunate having thousands of our own GPUs," Goodman explained.

Despite Nvidia's official announcement that its Blackwell chips are shipping, Ford has yet to receive any. Goodman also expressed reservations about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's assertion that Blackwell renders previous-generation Hopper chips obsolete.

"I don’t quite see it as they’re useless. He was, of course, trying to say that his new product is so much better than his old product, that he’s making his old product obsolete. But I suspect we’ll get a lot of use out of our Hopper GPUs the next few years. And we’re working on Blackwell. What I wish he would talk a little bit more about is the electricity requirements for Blackwell," Goodman stated.

Ford is facing significant challenges in upgrading its data center infrastructure to accommodate the high power consumption of Blackwell chips and future generations.