- Today BMW unveils the all-new IX.
An electric crossover that looks freaking sweet.
But instead of talking about the car,
BMW sponsored this video to focus on the billion Euro,
R and D headquarters that they just built
to make designing cars like the IX
as efficient as possible.
Now Munich is freaking awesome,
and under normal circumstances,
I would have been happy to go out there again
to check it out,
but you guys know the drill global pandemic.
Thankfully, a German camera team was able to go
in our stead and fire back a bunch
of footage that ranged from insanely cool to-
- [Narrator] Martians playing golf?
Philosophers?
- Why did we get this?
And for that matter, why does it exist?
And we were given access to BMW's engineers
to ask whatever questions we wanted.
This is going to be a hell of a ride.
(upbeat music)
- A couple of months ago, we were pretty happy
with the driving simulator that we built.
Big screen, comfy chair
that moves around when you hit bumps and such.
What more could you ask?
Oh, oh yeah.
That is on a whole other level.
What you're looking at right now is a test
of the site acceptance test high fidelity simulator
which has 400 square meters of play area to toss around
its 83 tons of mass.
The SAT high fidelity simulator is able
to not just faithfully recreate the 0.65 G's you'd get
from launching an M3
but is actually able to accurately
simulate the one G cornering force of a formula E car.
This combination of accurate longitudinal, transverse
and rotational movements along with VR glasses
or a headset allows BMWs engineers
and test drivers to experience the feel
of driving a car long
before the first physical prototype is ever made.
And some of you are probably thinking at this point,
wow Linus, 83 tons of mass being tossed around like that?
Probably requires a lot of energy and you'd be correct.
The high fidelity simulator can consume
up to six and a half megawatts
of power delivered by freaking super capacitors.
Now the full featured simulator isn't expected to be online
until early to mid next year, but when it is,
and travels are okay, BMW, call me.
Now all this attention
to making a car fun to drive
might make people want to drive rather fast in it,
particularly in Germany.
So BMW uses both active and passive safety features
to help their customers avoid the booboo mobile.
Active safety features try to prevent a crash
in the first place like lane assists,
emergency braking and various self-driving modes.
And these are great,
when you're daydreaming about retiring to a cranberry field
getting up each morning to overlook your beautiful bog when-
Holy crap! There's a person.
Active safety features are cool and all,
but the testing of the passive features
is a lot more fun to look at.
The key to making a car crash as safe
as possible is to design the structural layout
of the car so that the outside can be destroyed,
and in the process dissipate enough energy
to keep the driver inside safe.
The engineers there said
that the more contact area you have in a crash the better.
So fun fact, if you're cruising for a head-on bruising
and you can't avoid the other car outright,
aim more direct impact means
that the structures of the car will have their best chance
of safely slowing you.
Now the main crash test dummies used
are called the hybrid three.
They were originally developed by GM in the seventies,
but have since been adopted by the society
of automotive engineers, making them the industry standard.
But BMW has a full family
of dummies with six adult sizes and four children.
Another fun fact.
Well each one of these dummies costs more
than the car they're strapped into.
The test device for human occupant restraints,
AKA THOR here makes the rest
of the crash testing costs look tame.
It's worth as much as a house
in Vancouver.
The reason THOR is such an expensive boy
is that he is extra packed with sensors
to measure forces on the ribs, thorax, and other bones
to determine the likelihood of harm to an actual human being
in a given crash.
Now, because THOR does his best work in the blink of an eye,
getting good footage of him can be a bit of a challenge.
That's where these 50 high speed cameras come in.
Each one of them records at either 1000
or 5,000 frames per second,
generating about one gigabyte of footage per test.
Holy schnikes.
And the 50 cameras aren't even my favorite thing
in the room.
Now, as you guys might know,
getting good high speed footage requires
(speaks in German)
of light.
For perspective, this right here
is our brightest studio light.
It consumes about a thousand watts of power.
Hit me.
(screams)
Yap.
That's pretty bright all right,
but an FIZ Nord-
Okay. You can put it away.
It's hot too.
They have 350 times as much light to make sure
that they can clearly see all of the action.
And do you know what the best part
of all this high-speed camera tech is?
It's the redundancy.
The crash test dummies are strapped
with up to 192 signal channels
to record acceleration pressure
path, power, and so on.
So basically right after the crash,
the engineers have all the data they need.
The high speed footage is then just used
to verify all their findings.
Wanna know what's even crazier?
Before the test even starts,
the engineers know what the forces
and all the sensors are going to be.
Crashing the cars is already just verifying
the numbers that they simulated.
Man, computers are cool.
What kind of computers you ask?
First, let's take a moment
to appreciate the detail that's required
for this type of simulation.
A car will have about 12 million elements,
4,000 individual parts and 8,000 screws and spot welds.
Running a simulation like that?
That has got to take days, right?
Not if you have 120,000 CPU course
then it's more like 5 to 25 hours depending on the test.
Now, most of you probably noticed
that it feels like there's a bit
of a lag between when fancy electronics get unveiled
to the public, like a new GPU or a super snappy iPad,
and when equivalent tech is available in cars,
and there is a good reason for this, verification.
If a bit flips in your desktop gaming rig
the worst that can happen is a blue screen
during a ranked siege match.
In a car, well, there's a lot more at stake.
This is why BMW now has
four EMC or electromagnetic compatibility testing halls.
EMC testing is looking for two main things
that components aren't emitting too much electrical noise
and that their operation isn't influenced
by outside electrical noise.
According to the engineers
getting any individual component within spec
is pretty easy,
but these days, almost every component
in the car has wires and electricity running to them.
And the interaction of it all can get very complex.
For example, the fuel pump is going to emit a little bit
of electronic noise
during operation, which you probably won't notice
unless that noise happens to be in the same frequency band
as the radio causing your favorite beats to disappear
when you hit the gas.
Each of the four EMC halls basically looks
like a massive anechoic chamber
but instead of trapping noise
these walls are designed to trap
any stray electromagnetic radiation
behind the wall is shielding,
to prevent any outside electromagnetic radiation
from getting in.
Now, the hall is designed to work between 150 kilo Hertz
to six gigahertz, but measurements can be taken outside
of those frequencies just with less ideal test results.
The benefits of this are twofold.
The tests can be accurate
without any reflections or outside interference.
And also they aren't pumping electromagnetic noise
across the rest of the facility.
This is especially important
when they're testing how the components hold
up to external radiation.
These antennas
and signal generators basically turn the whole room
into a massive microwave.
Venous schnitzel, any one?
In about every room in this building,
there's probably an entire LTT videos worth
of cool tech, but we only have so much time today.
So let's quick fire around
some of the other cool things.
In the workshop testing and measuring building
or a WPN on the top floor,
there are 100 test benches and 200 laboratories.
On the second level there are 12 large test benches
that together pump about a thousand liters
of hydraulic oil per minute,
a 220 meter corridor and an axle testing room.
We weren't able to see all of this unfortunately,
largely because they're working on prototypes
of vehicles that are a long way from even being announced
in some of these rooms,
but with the IX being the latest
to finally see the light outside of the facility,
it gives me a lot of hope for the work that they're doing
inside it.
Of course,
no high tech lab is complete these days without some VR.
This allows engineers, designers,
and executives to get a much better idea
of how sitting in the car will feel compared
to looking at it on a screen.
In particular, they said
that this can be advantageous for designing leatherwork.
In the past,
this would be done on a physical model of the chair,
but because the designs are constantly changing
by the time their designs are done
the dimensions of the chair might have changed.
Well, now they're able to import accurate textures
onto the latest 3D models,
and then look at it in VR to make sure
that it can hold up in both light and dark environments.
And this is all powered by top tier gaming PC
or at least, well, it was top tier when we got this footage.
Hopefully they're subscribed
to LTT so they know how to upgrade it
to Ryzen 5,000, and one of the latest GPU's.
Huge thanks to BMW again for sponsoring this video
and letting us take a look inside their crazy facility.
As I said before, when the time's right
I would really like to take another crack at this one,
but actually driving the simulator instead.
You think they let me do that?
- [Crew Member] Yeah.
- Yeah, yeah.
If you guys enjoyed this video
maybe check out our last BMW video,
where I had to look at a sweet concept motorcycle
that BMW put together.