In BMW's simulation facility, cars sit inside a high-tech bubble that displays virtual worlds and moves realistically on tracks.
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Driving the car inside the simulator not only looks real, as the driver is inside a real car doing realistic driving and seeing high-fidelity imagery of the real world outside, but it also feels real, as the Sapphire’s systems can produce 0.65. That creates the feeling of accelerating, braking, and turning at believably high levels. The 183,000-lb. apparatus consumes 6.5 megawatts of power as it runs.
While simulators might look like excellent toys to the rest of us, they are critical tools for carmakers like BMW. “We see the driving simulator as a time machine because it lets us drive the car of the future,” explains Martin Wahle, head of Virtualization and Driving Simulator. BMW plans to add later parts of the vehicle development process to the simulation center’s work too. “We want to expand into implementation and verification modes,” Wahle says. This would include doing tuning work such as testing different tires and components like the anti-roll bars that limit cars’ body lean in turns. “We can change things almost instantly,” he says.
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