Case Study: BMW Group achieves zero-prototyping for passive safety with Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA (Abaqus)

BMW Group - Customer Case Study

BMW Group faced the challenge of meeting ever‑tightening crashworthiness standards while responding to consumer demands, lighter multi‑material construction and cost pressures, and set a corporate goal of eliminating physical prototypes for passive safety. To achieve this, BMW partnered with Dassault Systemes (SIMULIA) and used the Abaqus FEA suite (with CATIA V5 for CAD) to prove that simulation could drive design decisions previously reliant on crash prototypes.

Over almost a decade Dassault Systemes’ SIMULIA experts helped BMW Group implement advanced Abaqus models that incorporate local material and spot‑weld failure mechanisms and closely correlate with physical tests. The validated simulation program enabled BMW to skip soft‑tool prototyping and move directly to hardened production tooling, achieving zero‑prototyping for passive safety on the BMW 6 Series Gran Coupé, delivering significant development time and cost savings and much improved predictive accuracy (earlier, less complete models underpredicted firewall intrusion by about 30%).

BMW Group