Tim Stevens

You know, there's a lot of enthusiasm and excitement.

We had regulations in Europe and elsewhere that were saying that internal combustion was going to be dead by 2030.

But now, of course, all those things are being rolled back.

We're seeing a lot of anti-EV initiatives here in the US.

And that, I think, is a big thing we're seeing manufacturers having to pivot.

But we're also seeing these heavy touch-focused interfaces that were all looking very trendy four or five years ago.

And now we're seeing more and more people saying, hey, you know, I actually really like having a volume knob in my car.

I like having a couple of buttons in there.

So we're seeing manufacturers pulling back from that as well.

And this is a huge challenge for the manufacturers because for a long time, cars were pretty stable.

There weren't really that much of a change from one year to the next.

But now we're really expecting these major leaps forward in terms of technology, in terms of features.

And that's something that they're struggling with.

Okay.

Yeah, I think by and large, designers are not really ready to give the creative insight into these vehicles.

So by and large, they're looking for areas to improve the process.

So right now, we're seeing examples of GM doing things where they're taking a sketch and turning that into a 3D model via AI rather than hiring someone to go through a...

A 3D modeling suite, they'll feed it over to AI, a couple different angles of a sketch, and bam, they have a 3D model back out in five minutes, whereas it used to take a couple of weeks for a designer to do that kind of thing.

Steps like that can really help to speed up the process and help to pull that five, six-year process into maybe three years, which is really what they're focused on right now.

We are, though, seeing some interesting approaches where they are trying to do more generative AI in terms of new approaches for 3D.