Vehicle Electrification - August 24, 2011 - 11

Putting a V6 in the Model S
Most OEMs would love to build a productdevelopment
system from scratch, with their
engineers unburdened by legacy CAD, CAE, and
related processes. SAE Vehicle Electrification®
spoke with Tesla’s Engineering Tools Manager,
Paul Lomangino, about building his company’s
virtual-engineering environment.
Q: You joined Tesla in 2006. What direction
was the company’s product development
enterprise taking at that time?
Paul: We were using a variety of CAD systems—
SolidWorks, ProEngineer, CATIA V4 and V5, and
some NX. In an ideal world it would be great if
everybody could use the tool they wanted. We had
some serious fights in standardizing on a single
tool. CAD is like religion. But after much discussion
and the proper investments, our direction—
Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA V5 transitioning to the
new V6—is working well for us.
Q: How is Tesla managing the single-platform
strategy regarding your supply base?
Paul: It’s an evolutionary process. Going forward
on Model S we’re requiring that our suppliers use
CATIA. However, we’ve had to work with many
of our legacy suppliers, some of whom still use
drawings and for whom working with 3-D models
has been the next step in their progression.
Q: Tesla is migrating to DS’s Enovia V6 as its
PLM platform. How is that process coming?
Paul: We’ve uncovered a few snags, naturally.
But a key attribute of V6 is it’s been very quick to
tailor to our needs. I won’t call it customization,
which is actually writing codes. The V6 is very
flexible, which is great because we don’t want to
devote excess resources to process or tools. Our
total PLM team including CAD support, which
includes me, is just four people!
Q: Do the Model S guys like V6?
Paul: Yes. They were familiar with the incumbent
tool, and obviously there are a lot of
things we’re still learning about V6. We’re integrating
CATIA V5 into V6 using a tool called
Designer Central. We’d been using V5 with
SmartTeam [a software integration tool]. It
was a great tool for us out of the box, and
we’re managing expectations as we transition
from SmartTeam to Enovia V6.
SAE Vehicle Electrification evsae.com
August 24, 2011
Engineering
Tools Manager
Paul Lomangino
is a veteran of
Silicon Valley’s
microelectronics
industry and
Ford’s advanced
CAD/CAE group.
(Lindsay Brooke)
Q: Where do you see Tesla headed
regarding CAE?
Paul: We still have a fairly diverse CAE landscape,
using tools many of our guys brought over from
their prior experiences. We’re looking at what will
be available in the V6 platform for CAE for our
future. Our adoption of a broad V6 solution will
be more “vanilla, out-of-the-box” than a heavily
customized environment.
Q: What about virtual manufacturing tools?
Paul: We’ve adopted DS’s Delmia for bodyin-white
and assembly process planning. It’s
already delivered huge benefits. We’d been doing
assembly simulations in CATIA, and we learned a
lot from that. But there’s so much more richness in
the Delmia tool set, particularly in developing the
manufacturing bill of material. But we’re not there
yet with it.
Q: As Tesla progresses in CAD and PLM,
what is your team learning?
Paul: The traditional engineering practice that I
and others were used to was very sequential. At
Tesla we try to do as much as possible in parallel.
It requires a huge amount of effort, but it’s the only
way to get things done very quickly.
We’ve learned that making scalable
architectures, and the tools to go with them, really
does pay off later on, in not having to repeat effort.
As a start-up, we’ve realized that sometimes it’s
beneficial to have a little bit of ignorance. Learning
some of the hard lessons on our own gives us an
attitude to do it better.
And, a corporate lesson learned is that making
cars is a damned hard thing to do!
EV start-ups Special Edition
Lindsay Brooke
11
http://www.evsae.com
Vehicle Electrification - August 24, 2011

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