Engineering Solutions by Design News Talks 2023 Nissan Z-Car Steering Calibration

The pandemic led Nissan to share calibration work between U.S. and Japanese teams, who took turns on the work as the other team slept.

Hello i’m design news senior editor dan carney and coming up on the engineering solutions by design news podcast we talked to nissan zcar senior project engineer matt wright who will tell us about his team’s greatest challenge developing nissan’s next generation flagship sports car and how they conquered it welcome to the engineering solutions by design

News podcast and thank you for listening today’s guest is matt wright he’s a senior project engineer for the 2023 nissan z who can tell us about the development of the z’s steering and powertrain calibration i would think that a project like a z car is not the sort of thing that comes along very often and must be a highlight and along with that probably there

Are heightened expectations so i’m wondering if you can talk about what was the you know what your thoughts about how exciting is this project and what was the um the biggest challenge that you faced in uh in doing it yeah absolutely and you are 100 correct the projects like the z don’t come around often and i have to be one of the ones who gets to participate

In that is uh exciting and the the challenge that presented the most trouble for us was the travel restrictions uh due to the covenant situation in japan that prevented us from doing our typical processes for evaluation and tuning typically we would get everybody from using japan side that’s involved we get everybody together at the same place in the same time

Testing in the same cars on the same roads you know basically using the the time gap between united states and japan to our advantage so we would go out during the day here in the united states and we would do the things that we’d normally do with our japanese counterparts you know we’d collect some data we would you know do our subjective evaluations for uh

What feels right and what needs more work what are the kinds of places where you would go to do that yeah we have routes throughout arizona and california uh those guys would then go make adjustments to the the software and the the maps and the roms and uh send that back to japan and then uh while we’re here sleeping in the united states japan was updating

Their vehicles with with the new software uh and they’d go evaluate on their proving grounds and uh they would do the same thing and they’d feed back to us and make recommendations and then we’d do it all again did you find that this uh around the clock uh development process ended up actually accelerating your work don’t know i’d say it accelerated it but i

I do think there were some benefits that came out of it uh one of them um they really had to allow us to take more control of some of the the tuning and that’s not to mean that we we did the whole thing it just means that typically they would be here in the united states doing the actual you know software tuning and some more of the the technical aspect of it

But they weren’t able to do that so they actually had to hand over um that responsibility to us in some part and let our guys here do that actual um software tuning it ended up helping to build that relationship between ourselves and japan so that was really good so going forward does that mean that you’ll be able to uh do that that same sort of a role in future

Projects as well now that you maybe earned their trust yeah i think that’s definitely a possibility um it’s helpful for everybody i and it’s also helpful because it can reduce the number of iterations right so if we have guys here that know clearly what we’re trying to resolve and they’re able to just go into the software and make the changes that resolve it and

Then we can just show directly what we’re trying to do um that’s that’s helpful it just cuts down on the back and forth trying to iron out exactly what we’re looking to do that’s fantastic what was your favorite outcome from this project i think you know the team in general is really proud of the steering so that was something that uh one of the things that

Uh our japanese counterparts had to let go of a little bit and let us get more involved because of those travel restrictions uh we’ve become pretty good at the steering tuning and the software side of that locally so those guys did an excellent job getting some good steering tuning into this new eps system fantastic well it sounds like the the project worked

Out maybe unexpectedly well under the circumstances so uh congratulations on that accomplishment yeah thank you thank you so much for your time today absolutely my pleasure thanks for having me thank you for listening to the engineering solutions by design news podcast where we explored the solutions engineers have devised to their very toughest challenges

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Engineering Solutions by Design News Talks 2023 Nissan Z-Car Steering Calibration By Nissan Z