19 September, 2018, London — Project 424 welcomes its first brand technology partners to the team as the development of the world’s first all-electric and autonomous Le Mans Prototype race car enters an exciting new phase of development.
The trio of new partners, Onshape, SimScale and migenius, will form an integral part of Project 424’s overall development through the provision of high-performance, cloud-based tools for the design, simulation and 3D prototype renderings of this unique Le Mans Prototype race car.
In a world-first for the motorsport and high-performance engineering industry, the entire design of the PERRINN Project 424 car is publicly accessible and available to view online through Onshape’s cloud CAD software. From this point, SimScale’s CAE cloud-based platform seamlessly integrates with Onshape to allow Project 424 to complete the design validation on every aspect of the race car, while migenius’ RealityServer for Onshape boasts the capability to generate hyper-realistic 3D renderings for virtual prototyping.
Nic Perrin, Project 424 founder, said: “At the heart of Project 424 is digital, decentralised collaboration with teams of people working towards their own goal — in this case, making the world’s first all-electric Le Mans 24H race car with autonomous drive and machine learning. The digital transformation in design and engineering enables us to achieve a much faster rate of development on the car while controlling R&D costs.”
“We are delighted to be partnering with Onshape, SimScale and migenius as they mirror the project’s openly accessible and collaborative values. Their services and contributions will be integral to the success of Project 424 and we are confident that the knowledge generated and shared will enable these innovative companies to use in developing even more of their own cutting-edge products.”
With Onshape headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and SimScale in Munich, Germany, migenius in Melbourne, Australia, Project 424 has the flexibility to develop the car within this global community at any time and place.
Jon Hirschtick, CEO and co-founder, Onshape, said: “PERRINN’s vision to bring teams together around open access design data is truly disruptive for the motorsport industry. We believe this is how globally distributed teams will work from now on, with access to up-to-date CAD data no longer being a barrier when using Onshape. Having PERRINN’s Project 424 car modeled and shared using Onshape is hugely rewarding for our team and we cannot wait to see this revolutionary vehicle on the racetrack.”
David Heiny, CEO, SimScale, said: “Project 424 is an exciting endeavor as Nic is setting up a development process for a complex technical product starting from a clean sheet of paper. The Project 424 software stack will enable a decentralized team to seamlessly collaborate and take advantage of practically unlimited computing power. We’re excited to contribute to the success of the project with cloud-based Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation!”
Paul Arden, CEO, migenius, said: “We are delighted to be able to contribute to the amazing Project 424. It really combines so many interesting technologies and processes that when Nic [Perrin] reached out to us about collaborating we just couldn’t resist. The kind of decentralised design and development the project is pioneering is exactly where we envisioned our RealityServer photorealistic rendering technology being used. We have always been a cloud-first company and it has been great to work with a like-minded global team.”
To stay up to date with the ongoing developments of Project 424 please visit the dedicated website at www.project424.com.
Paul Arden has worked in the Computer Graphics industry for over 20 years, co-founding the architectural visualisation practice Luminova out of university before moving to mental images and NVIDIA to manage the Cloud-based rendering solution, RealityServer, now managed by migenius where Paul serves as CEO.