Tim Stevens

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, usually it starts with a sketch or a series of sketches.

There'll be kind of a product design brief that comes from the business saying, hey, we need a car that's got two doors, four doors, seats this number of people, can do this sort of thing.

Designers start sketching.

People will give them a thumbs up or thumbs down.

They start to move forward.

There's usually a couple of different concepts, but they move from...

paper sketches to digital sketches to 3D models.

At some point, someone will carve the thing out of clay to make sure it actually looks good in the real world.

There's usually some level of virtual reality design, but ultimately, most designers still like to see the physical thing in action.

So they'll carve small models in clay.

If that looks good, they'll move it into a full-scale clay and then

At that point, they'll start to do wind tunnel testing, engineering testing, virtual crash testing.

There's a whole lot of series of steps that need to come together before that thing can enter production.

And that whole process can take upwards of five or six years, which is pretty remarkable.

So, you know, the next-gen amazing new technology cars that are hitting the roads this summer were in production, in design and development in the early 2020s, you know, back around when COVID was still going on.

So,

It's an amazingly long and detailed process, which makes it really hard for product planners to really kind of foresee where the market is going to be in five or six years.

And it's a really huge challenge right now for all the manufacturers because things are changing very quickly right now.

Yeah, I think on one hand, we see a lot of manufacturers pulling back from EVs, which were really looking for ways to kind of take over the market back in 2020, 2021.