Of course, Combemorel isn’t suggesting a one-day development cycle any time soon: two years is ambitious enough. And the key to achieving that target, he says, is through new technology. “You cannot disconnect speed and technology,” he says. “It’s impossible. Both are linked together.”
The project to accelerate development is called Leap 100. Renault calculates that it is aiming to cut 16% from the time spent on upstream activities (the wider planning and identification of models), a huge 41% from development (from design to the refinement of technology) and 26% from the final industrialisation process, such as setting up production and distribution networks.
Broadly, Leap 100 is focused on finding time savings in seven key areas: governance; diversity complexity; design; quality control; data and AI; validation and homologation; and supplier strategy. Here are some of the ways the firm is achieving that.
Design
Renault’s efforts to speed up the design process of its cars centre on harnessing technology, in particular artificial intelligence (AI). But no, ChatGPT isn’t going to design the next Scenic.
“AI is just data, so it’s knowledge,” says Stefano Bolis, Renault’s head of design strategy and advanced tech. “AI has knowledge, but is knowledge intelligence?” Essentially, if you asked AI to design a new Scenic, it would delve through countless images of previous versions and other Renaults before coming up with its own take based on old design language. What AI can’t do is progress and develop the design for the new one, but Bolis says it can help: “You just need to use it the right way.”
The Renault Group has developed its own locked-down AI model, built purely using a confidential database for each of its four brands (Renault, Alpine, Dacia and Mobilize). Each designer can upload elements to define their own individual style, which only they can access. “It’s their ‘secret recipe’,” says Bolis. “Designers are friends but they’re competing to win pitches so they don’t want to share their own workings.”
That AI model is then used to accelerate the process. “Human creativity will make the difference,” says Bolis, “and AI gives us more time for that.” So a designer will sketch a whole car or specific part, and then use the AI tool to quickly turn that into a digital model. It won’t be perfect, but in seconds a designer has a 3D model they can then refine. Previously, that task would have taken a modelling team one or two days.
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