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 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
martians playing golf philosophers hey 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
a couple 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 for 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
.65 g's you'd get from launching an m3 but is actually able to accurately
simulate the 1g cornering force of a formula e car this combination of
accurate longitudinal transverse and rotational movements along with vr
glasses or a headset allows bmw's 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 travel's 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 woo-woo 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 a 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 70s 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
while 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 1 000 or 5 000 frames per second
generating about one Gigabyte of footage per test holy shnikeys
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
mirror spoolbecklin vol of light
for perspective this right here
is our brightest studio light it consumes about a thousand watts of power
hit me ah
yep that's pretty bright alright
but at 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 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 in 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's got to take
days right not if you have 120 000 CPU cores then
it's more like 5 to 25 hours depending on the test now most of you have
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 kilohertz to 6 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
wienerschnitzel anyone in about every room in this building there's probably
an entire LTT video's 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 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 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 leather work 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 a 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 5000 and one of the
latest gpus 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 but actually
driving the simulator instead think they'd let me do that yeah yeah yeah if
you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our last bmw video where i had a
look at a sweet concept motorcycle that bmw put together