interested in starting my own automobile company, need advice 1

[86corolla]

I am contimplating starting my own automobile company. I need advice regarding what computer programs I will need to design a car basically from scratch, and if trail versions are available for free. I know I will need a CFD program but I am not sure which would be the best for someone without a supercomputer. The same holds true for a FEA program.

All posts will be read and all posts will be greatly appreciated.

 

[dicer]

Great idea. And you will have no problem competing. The key is a good product at a very low price.
Don't the big outfits use Catia?
The design part should be pretty easy. Its the tooling that is going to be the difficult part and costly.
Is it to be made of metal or fiberglass? How many units per day month or what ever? Are you going to do everything in house or outsource? The machinery costs are going to be a huge deterent. If you are looking at using many existing off the shelf parts for your vehicle, then why would you need to design an engine for it? Its much easier to take something off the shelf and do what ever modifications that are needed to accomplish what you are trying to do. Unless it is a completly different engine design.
I hope you do succeed in this, and I hope you can design something way better than all the rest, as they have all lost any ability to style a car.

 

[msquared48]

Go to the Feds and ask to be bailed out BEFORE you need it - call it your conservation of energy program...

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

 

[richkeogh]

CFD wise I use Fluent, and can highly recommend it.
There is also a version that is integrated into Catia, although I haven't tried that.
This isn't a cheap package though.
I regularly use Catia, Pro/Engineer and NX6.
I find Catia the "best" of the 3 but there is little really to choose between them, annoyingly whatever I'm trying to do on one of them always seems to be much more straighforward on one of the other 2. Pro/Engineer is the cheapest I think, and seems to be popular with powertrain rather than entire vehicles.
Any of these packages can be run on a non-super computer, indeed I run them alll successfully off a laptop that cost about £1000. A good graphics card is pretty important though.