How Renault cut car development time in half

PARIS — With a face that resembles a frog, the cherry-red Twingo EV threaded the narrow, winding streets of the French capital with startling agility.

Its range of roughly 260 kilometers (160 miles) on a single charge is less than generous but forgivable in a car built for Europe’s cities and pitched at first-time buyers. Its plastic front end and manual seats and windows reflect the trade-offs needed to keep its price below 20,000 euros ($22,500). 

Renault developed the car in little more than two years, about half the four years the industry typically needs for a new vehicle. That pace was made possible by new technologies at the Technocentre, Renault’s research and development center in Guyancourt, about 20 kilometers outside Paris.

An engineer climbed into a vehicle mock-up inside a dome during the Korean press’s recent visit on Oct. 12, where a 360-degree virtual road unfurled around him. When he pressed the accelerator, a six-axis motion platform beneath the simulator, known as ROADS, tilted and shifted the body to reproduce acceleration, braking, cornering and the feel of the road. 

For example, engineers once had to build physical tires with different characteristics and test each one. On the simulator, however, they can adjust those properties virtually and compare the results, cutting about 10 weeks from tire development. 

“It took roughly four years to develop a car, but it's now cut to two,” a Renault engineer said during the tour. “A standard task that once took a team of 10 six months now takes the same team two weeks.”

The 1.5 million-square-meter (16.1 million-square-foot) campus employs some 9,100 people from 67 countries, and each model is assigned a project team drawn from design, engineering, purchasing, quality and production planning, which works together from the earliest stages through the start of manufacturing.

More than 90 percent of the center’s design and development work is done through digital simulation, supported by 5,000 computer-aided engineering workstations and 12 supercomputer clusters.

At the XR Innovation Lab, this reporter put on an extended-reality headset and took the driver’s seat of a car that does not yet exist, its virtual cabin paired with a real seat and steering wheel to test sightlines and ergonomics. 

To onlookers, it appeared to be grasping at thin air, but a monitor tracking the headset’s view showed rendered hands exploring the interior. 

This process trims five to 10 weeks from the design phase. 

Renault Group in March pledged 36 new models across its brands by 2030, including 22 for Europe, 16 of them electric, and 14 for markets abroad under its futuREady strategies

Renault Korea, which operates a plant in Busan, has confirmed plans to introduce a new hybrid in the second half of 2027 and a Korean-built electric vehicle in 2028.

BY SARAH CHEA   [[email protected]]