Understandably, the focus of a lot of our car coverage here at Ars has been on things like hybrid and electric powertrains, autonomous vehicles, and the rise of the connected car. But there are other interesting technology stories in the auto industry that are a little more hidden from the average driver. Take Gordon Murray's iStream idea, for example. From the same brain that created some of the world's best racing cars—and the almighty McLaren F1 road car—iStream is meant to be a low-impact way of building new vehicles, which will hopefully reach fruition with the reborn TVR brand. There's also 3D printing, as demonstrated by companies like Local Motors and 3D Divergent.

And then there's the way that modern IT solutions can—hopefully—make the auto industry more efficient and faster to respond to new design trends or challenges. A while back, we looked at Toyota's use of virtual production lines to streamline how the company builds trucks at its plant in Texas. Obviously, Toyota isn't the only OEM to head off into the virtual world to do this kind of work. And many OEMs have opted for Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCE as their platform of choice.

Users of 3DEXPERIENCE span the automotive ecosystem. Ford and GM power their commercials and marketing with the Dassault platform. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has been touting 3DEXPERIENCE as its tool of choice for early design and styling. And even the Internet's favorite EV maker is a client: the Tesla Model 3 was conceived and designed using it.

Now, it's true that techniques like computer-assisted design (CAD) or computer-assisted manufacturing (CAM) are nothing new. But Dassault Systèmes says its approach is unique. Michael LaLande, Americas Director of Transportation and Mobility at Dassault Systèmes likens 3DEXPERIENCE to the smartphone:

It's a platform, and many of the apps are enablers of the platform. So we don't produce hardware, but our platform is the infrastructure and 542 apps that run on it, seamlessly and integrated. Not having integration means you can't seamlessly move data from one format or file to another.

To put that practically, LaLande means that the data files that start life in the design office when a company is shaping a new car can also be used down the line in CGI commercials or an online car configurator. From product development, manufacturing, and on to marketing, 3DEXPERIENCE aims to be a form of digital automotive soup-to-nuts.

3DEXPERIENCE came to our attention atop the Empire State Building where Ford was publicizing its use in a VR experience of the new Mustang. But perhaps the platform's cleverest use—at least to me—has been virtual crash testing. As you'll see in the embedded video, Honda has been using the tech to understand its crash-test results.

While we're unlikely to stop loading up metal-and-plastic vehicles with sensors and crash-test dummies before driving them into immovable objects on-camera any time soon, being able to run through the process a few times virtually is much cheaper, and it might help manufacturers avoid any unpleasant surprises.

And if the simulations are good enough, using a virtual test that lets you strip off or hide parts of the vehicle to see how individual components, like fuel systems, get affected seems like a no-brainer. Watching the video, that certainly seems to be the case—the side-by-side comparison toward the end shows a remarkable fidelity between the actual, physical crash test and the simulated version.

Now, if that future of responsive manufacturing and cheap, low-volume niche vehicles enabled by 3D printing and rapid prototyping would finally just arrive, we'll be golden.