Credit for whether a car is good or not falls almost wholly upon the company whose badge is on the bonnet. But behind any major car maker lies a host of other firms helping to get new models on the road.
Siemens is a global technology company whose hardware and software support all parts of the car industry. Its work covers all aspects of car design, development and manufacturing as well as a car company’s wider operations. For example, Siemens’ tech was used to reduce the footprint of a factory by 20% at the design stage by simulating and automating the production environment.
We’ve been getting to know Siemens better, with the company partnering the 2025 Autocar Awards (winners revealed 25 June) and an Autocar Business webinar next week (26 June) to look at the vital role of software in the industry. You can sign up for free here.
Uday Senapati, vice-president for automotive, mobility and battery at Siemens Advanta, its consultancy business, wants to showcase how Siemens “has everything that helps the automotive industry get to the next stage faster and get products to market faster”.
Indeed, “mind-blowing” is how one global automotive R&D chief described to me AI software tools they credited with helping speed up car development and, unprompted, he named Siemens as a company leading the way here.
He cited the design and development of a fuel tank installation in a new car. This complex packaging puzzle can take a week to carefully package into the car but was demonstrated by an AI tool that did it in “hours”. He called the development of such tools “sudden and aggressive” and “amazing”.
Senapati, who has led Lotus’s product strategy and was Bentley’s Mulliner chief, said Siemens was bolstering its own software capabilities by working with partners and through acquisitions, most notably a recent $10 billion (£7.4bn) acquisition of US-based software simulation company Altair Engineering.
This will help boost a particular speciality of Siemens in creating digital twins of real-life parts, which, says Senapati, covers “the raw material of a battery to a full engine or a full car”, to the point where “you can test the whole car in the digital world”.
Digital twins are “one area that [legacy] OEMs have not yet embraced or haven’t embraced fast enough. If you think of disruptors, especially from China, many have embraced our technologies” in this area, says Senapati.
He claims Chinese OEMs can develop an all-new car on an all-new platform in no more than three years and derivatives and refreshes in half that. In Western OEMs, an all-new car and platform is four years minimum, with refreshes taking three years.
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