Project 424 Race Car Accelerating Digital Design Via Cloud Partners

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 a new development phase.

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 Le Mans Prototype race car.

In what's reported as a feat 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 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.

“At the heart of Project 424 is digital, decentralized 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,” Nic Perrin, Project 424 founder, says. “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.”  

Perrin adds, “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.”

“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,” Jon Hirschtick, CEO and co-founder, Onshape, says.

“The Project 424 software stack will enable a decentralized team to seamlessly collaborate and take advantage of practically unlimited computing power,” adds David Heiny, CEO, SimScale. “We're excited to contribute to the success of the project with cloud-based finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation!”

“The kind of decentralized 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,” Paul Arden, CEO, migenius, says.

Founded in 2011 by former Formula 1 engineer Nic Perrin, Project 424 is the genesis project for the PERRINN.com online communication platform. Project 424 aims to achieve the goal of racing at the Le Mans 24-hour race in an all-electric World Endurance prototype racing car with autonomous drive technology and machine learning. In a world-first, all the designs and future iterations of the car are, and will be, openly accessible by the public using Project 424’s cloud-based tools.

For more info, visit Project 424, Onshape, SimScale and migenius.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.

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