Dassault and Siemens excited by same two auto show winners

First, there were the excited retweets from Germany's Siemens PLM Systems:

The North American Car of the year is... The 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid! Congrats again, @Ford! Retweeted by SiemensPLM

The North American Truck of the Year is... The 2010 Ford Transit Connect! Congrats, @Ford. Retweeted by SiemensPLM

Then, there was the we-own-the-auto-world* press release from France's Dassault Systemes:

...CATIA was utilized in the design of the 2010 North American Car of the Year -- the Ford Fusion Hybrid -- and Truck of the Year -- the Ford Transit Connect.

I s'pose the good thing is that Government Motors didn't win.

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*) The head and subhead of their press release read, "CATIA-Designed Vehicles Continue to Take Over the Road: Virtually 80% of World Debuts at 2010 Detroit Auto Show Designed in Dassault Systemes Flagship Software."

It is good to know that Dassault considers CATIA as its flagship software. What with all that yadder about PLM over the last many years, I'd've gotten the impression CAD no longer was of interest.

Comments

[Owen Wengerd]

My lovely and talented wife helped design an important and critically acclaimed drive train component of the Fusion -- with ProE.

[Evan Yares]

...CATIA was utilized in the design of the 2010 North American Car of the Year -- the Ford Fusion Hybrid -- and Truck of the Year -- the Ford Transit Connect.

So was AutoCAD.

OK... all kidding aside, Ford uses CATIA for a lot of stuff, but they still use NX for powertrain design.

And, by the way, their core PLM software is Teamcenter, and their "digital buck" (digital mockup) is based on the JT format.

Both Siemens and Dassault can brag about being major Ford engineering IT suppliers.

[RobiNZ]

The next press release will be from Microsoft. I bet they all used, to some extent, Notepad.exe.

[Sid]

Completely agree with Robinz. Next will be Apple, claiming iPods & iPhones were used for critical communication & employee stress reduction. :)

[Stan Przybylinski]

As we all know, most large companies use software from almost ALL of the competitors in the market. But, the number of Ford programs for which Siemens can make CAD claims will decrease, since Ford committed in 2007 to standardize on CATIA as their Global Design and Engineering Standard and to replace I-deas in powertrain as well:

http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/launch.aspx?eid=8681db67-bcb7-4ce0-aa5c-cfe5fbc53855&pnum=14