Kirsty Andrew, vice president of UK operations at automotive testing and proving ground specialist, UTAC, has told Just Auto that AI will be a gamechanger in the world of automotive product testing.

In an exclusive interview and podcast, she said: "AI is going to be a gamechanger. We are still in that [early] phase, certainly in terms of the testing environment, where we are trying to work out how we use the power of AI to improve testing.”

Click below to listen to the full podcast.

Andrew said that AI would mean that testing could be conducted more rapidly to produce results that mean customers can bring product to market more quickly or underpin design decisions sooner.

Andrew also said a key challenge is the rapid transformation we are seeing due to advanced technology. “As a testing industry, the challenge for us is to be agile and to be customer focused. In the huge industrial eco-system we work in, what is the technology going to look like in five years’ time?”

To demonstrate the pace and scale of technological change coming, she also pointed out that a significant number of the jobs that today’s young children will do when they leave school probably don’t exist yet.

“But that does bring amazing opportunity, because what people may have traditionally thought of as design or engineering or manufacturing will be changing. A raft of opportunities will open up to people who may not have thought of automotive as the home for their skillsets. We don’t know how far AI is going to take us.”

UTAC operates the Millbrook Pricing Ground in the UK and is well known as a facility for the extensive testing of prototype vehicles and new technologies. However, Andrew says the customer base for UTAC is much wider than the automotive OEMs.

“The OEMs are a very significant part of our customer base, but it goes beyond passenger cars to the truck manufacturers, bus manufacturers and also the major suppliers. We might be doing component level testing, sub-system testing, whole vehicle testing and each of those elements have a different supply chain and customer base that we would deal with. We’ll also deal with government agencies; for example Transport for London (TfL).”

She goes on to describe non-automotive testing that UTAC takes on including products ranging from electric bicycles to military vehicles and aerospace systems.