Ford’s simulators have quietly shaped its entire modern lineup

Ford has quietly leaned on driving simulators to develop much of its current Blue Oval roster, cutting development time and cost while refining everything from NVH to advanced driver aids. The Dearborn-based Dynamic Driving Simulator, commissioned in 2021, boasts a wider motion envelope than the Ford Performance unit and has already shaped models like the Maverick, Mustang Mach-E, and F-150 Lightning. “We can run ten times as many tests in a tenth of the time,” said Louis Jamail, Vehicle Dynamics Core Methods and Simulation Supervisor at Ford, who moved over from Ford Performance. Jamail saw first-hand how the racing-focused simulator could accelerate mainstream car development. “We were developing this on the racing side, and I saw huge potential to use it for mainstream product development at the same time,” he explained. The simulator has also been used to test features such as BlueCruise and ADAS systems before any physical prototypes rolled off the line. “The earlier you can look at a vehicle in its totality and its parts, the better you’re going to influence quality, performance, customer targets; all of those things,” Jamail noted. “You’re then not having to wait to build cobbled prototypes to find out a suspension type or something else didn’t work for the targets that you’re setting. We can evaluate that stuff much earlier now. We can iterate through it at ten times the speed that we could by cobbling parts on a vehicle.”