Case Study: Ford Motor Company achieves standardized, accelerated drive-cycle test analysis with MathWorks (MATLAB)

Ford Develops MATLAB Based Tool for Analyzing Drive-Cycle Test Results

Ford Motor Company’s Vehicle Energy Management Engineering team needed to standardize how they evaluate drive‑cycle test results for emissions, fuel economy, and performance, replacing inconsistent spreadsheets and ad hoc scripts. To build a single production tool and improve development practices, they partnered with MathWorks and leveraged MATLAB (with Simulink, Database Toolbox, and the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox) to create CycleTool.

With MathWorks consultants’ guidance, Ford Motor Company implemented CycleTool — a MATLAB‑based application (about 60,000 lines of code) that adds database support, a user interface, automated testing, and continuous integration — enabling teams in the UK, Germany, Australia, Mexico, the US, and China to share, analyze, and report test vs. simulation results. The MathWorks‑based solution accelerated development, turned one‑off scripts into a maintainable product with version control and CI, and delivered organization‑wide adoption and reproducible analyses across multiple global sites.

Ford Motor Company