When Christopher Rhody starts a crash test, everything stays nice and quiet. No loud crashing noises, no broken glass and no bent fenders. The Audi employee responsible for developing side and head protection simulates crash situations on a computer. New supercomputers now make these crash simulations even more precise and realistic.

The “cluster” – a collection of 320 processors – achieves over 15 teraflops of processing power, which corresponds to 15 billion computer operations per second. All this makes it the fastest computer in the automotive industry – and one of the 150 fastest in the world.

The faster the computer, the more definitive and certain the accident simulation will be. Developers conduct about 5,000 simulations each week – from frontal crashes to special component tests – which allow them to determine and correct possible weak points prior to construction even before the first prototypes are constructed.

Crash simulations make it possible to develop cars according to current market conditions, in accordance with customer requirements or findings from Audi’s own Audi Accident Research Unit.

A single car model goes through about 1,000 simulations per week during its 48-month development phase. Before the first prototype is built, the virtual car has already completed more than 100,000 computer simulations. Computing these can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a week, depending on the complexity of the accident.

When the developers finally conduct the real crash tests, the cars have already achieved an extremely high standard of safety through the use of the computer simulations.