Happy Easter – Is Engineering Eating Itself?

I have been working for the same company, since the start of the Millennium. Last month I turned 55 and the inevitable came along and it hit me hard. That sudden bump from the rear felt like the beginning of something. That something was ‘starting to feel old’ and there is another conversation about timing here.

Some of my CAE colleagues, in-particular those with a background in Automotive safety will be familiar with occupant injury and restraints development. They might be able to relate this to the force of an airbag deploying in slow motion against your face. BANG! what was that? “That was the main part of your career mate” and now you’ve only got about ten laps left until you’ve lost that chance to do that special thing that you’ve always wanted to do..

Since the start of Simpact and as I type, our CAE team have been working on a total of 1486 projects. Some big, some small. Some were very memorable and some were not.

What is nice for any CAE Engineer involved in an engineering project developing something new, is seeing it for real for the very first time and in most instances, we think that a CAE Engineers mind can probably still see an overlay or a cross section of the virtual model(s) that you once used and developed of that thing. I remember seeing the Jaguar X400 (X-TYPE) for the first time and saying to myself ‘I designed that’ or ‘bits of that.’ That can also be far from the truth of course and the Chief Engineer of the entire vehicle programme usually gets the overall credit.

For a young Mechanical Engineering student who set his sights on the UK automotive industry after completing his PhD at University, the idea that you could see cars on the road with ‘your’ thing on it gave me a real kick and incentive to join this industry.

25 years later, I wish I could say the same about the engineering consultancy that we delivered in China in the decade after the noughties. This period was just as transformative as the European motor industry in the noughties, but I often ask myself if it was the right thing to do? It certainly felt like the right thing to do at the time as it resulted in safer vehicles and less deaths on the road, worldwide. It was a logical progression to help the new Chinese OEM’s to do what we had already done for our customers in Europe. The Simpact CAE team had built a strong reputation in vehicle safety development having delivered the various derivatives of the Jaguar X400 (contracted to MSX International) and then the X400 wagon/estate variant (contracted to Pininfarina Spa in Italy).

This was China in the 2010’s when there were many new car companies in mainland China racing to be their biggest OEM. Get this right with a price point to attract the masses and high volumes in the home market and you could be the FIRST TO BE REALLY RICH. The now well-known BYD were building their very own dreams of being a proper car company after starting off as a battery manufacturer. There were several of these new kids on the block and we had worked with a handful of them.

I loved working in China, and I hated working in China. I loved jetting off to the other side of the planet as a young professional and joining an international team running a modern vehicle programme. At Chery Automotive in Wuhu (Anhui province), most of the on-site Attribute Team Leaders were Dutch (from the Eindhoven area as PD&E (now VDL) was their Tier 1 supplier. I was in my mid Thirties with a reasonable amount of experience in OEM vehicle safety development, so a large part of my job was expected to also teach their youngest and brightest graduate Mechanical Engineers how to go about vehicle safety development.

The codeword for the new road car that we were to develop was the M16. Our contract required us to deliver the top 5-star EU-NCAP score on top of the legal EU and Chinese NCAP requirements. Simpact had worked out how to do this previously and had put the systems and processes in place during their time at Jaguar. We then honed these processes with other OEM customers especially in the EU and now the FE models are so good, it is now a relatively straightforward task to achieve this level of automotive safety given the right combination of experience, hardware and software. As the M16 safety team did not have any real experience, they were relying on me to teach and guide them.

But then add to this challenge, a very limited access to the commercial crash analysis software that we were used to using (such as LS-DYNA3D or RADIOSS). Chery’s licences could only be accessed via special request via another department. I immediately threw all my toys out of the pram and threatened to leave as it was not what I was expecting or a way in which I could possibly work. It felt a bit like having to design a car wearing a blindfold.

This philosophy in holding back did force me to think back on my education and experience of the vehicle safety design process and the same concepts for occupant injury reduction that I had sketched and developed on previous OEM platforms. It taught us to talk to each other more about this experience and make more use of our brains. This in-turn drove us to be more confident and efficient in the use of expensive CAE software, and this generated better value for our client.

I don’t even know if the M16 made it to market as I left China after the confirmation crash tests. Now, almost 15 years later, I think of how important this experience was. It means that you don’t have to analyse everything and if you do, just remember how expensive something is instead of using your free (in-house) brain capacity. Today in 2026 we are no longer limited in CPU hardware so we have become lazy when it comes to model size and complexity. We are in danger of consuming ourselves and the process of designing a new vehicle has become a systems engineering approach with a risk of drowning in the process. Cars are being called boring and computers on wheels. We think it is time to use CAE software less and use more of your brain.

Chery confirmed a 4-star EU-NCAP performance for M16 in 2012 via (in-house) full scale crash tests and during our time there we pushed for more access to CAE software tools that have been shown to be so beneficial in the Western World. Fast forward to where we are now in 2026 and China leads the world in volume automotive with a strong offer of reliability, safety and durability at a price point that is difficult for the West to compete with.

It is time for the engineering community to stop hiding behind the glamour of CAE software and get off our lazy backsides…?