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"Since the early days of the auto industry, the actual work product created by engineers has changed alongside the available technology and regulations that had to be met. Naturally, as vehicles and the environment they operate in become more complex and sophisticated so too does the work life of the engineer. Long before the first horseless carriages emerged from workshops in the 1880s, engineers would develop solutions to the problems of the day, often taking copious notes as they contemplated and tested ideas. Those notes would often include sketches of varying detail depending on the talents of particular engineer. When Karl Benz and his contemporaries were grinding away on the first motorized vehicles, most of the documentation consisted of part drawings needed by the carpenters and blacksmiths fabricating and assembling parts. The work in those days was largely trial and error, and aimed at creating a product that could simply run on its own. Performance targets and regulations that might dictate engineering practices were still decades away.  As the industry grew, consumers were soon burdened with a choice of vehicles, each featuring different specifications. Engineers were called upon to create products that beat the competition. That meant benchmarking the other guys and using that information as a baseline before starting work on the next new model. Soon engineers were dedicated to developing and improving those performance measurments, in addition to creating cars that were faster, roomier and more stylish than what the competition offered.  Until the 1970s engineering tools were comparatively primitive. Comparative evaluation was still mostly done by subjective, seat-of-the-pants measurement. Even the so-called formal tests for rating things like horsepower were pretty loose in those days and not very useful for comparison between different companies. Over the past century, the Society of Automotive Engineers has frequently formed committees that defined standards for measurements and test procedures. An excellent example of that work was pressed into service in 1972, when SAE standard J1349 was ratified for testing power output on a dynamometer. Prior to J1349, engines were typically tested with no power-sapping accessories or restrictive exhaust systems, yielding numbers inflated by 25-30 percent. The post-1972 SAE ratings are much more relevant to the consumer, and later post-2005 SAE-certified numbers are even more so.  As strict safety and emissions regulations came into force starting in the late 1960s, the work product of engineers suddenly became much more complicated. Because new vehicles were now subjected to an array of government-mandated testing procedures, engineers started to spend more time defining performance requirements before they ever got around to actual design work. For a new vehicle program, that requirement gathering process and initial analysis may take a year or more before the specifications for the vehicle are defined. Today engineers spend months doing computer modeling and analysis based on government regulations, competition and market trends before a single part is actually designed on the CAD screen. Early parts get installed on current generation vehicles known as mules for initial testing. Final prototypes that actually look like a new car aren&amp;#039;t created until about 10-12 months before production starts. Along the way, engineers will produce hundreds or thousands of complex spreadsheets, detailed digital models of every individual part, as well as models of the entire vehicle, and terabytes of data from all the simulation work.  With so many more engineers working on a new car, both within the automaker and at any of the hundreds of supplier companies, entire teams of program managers are involved just to track everyone&amp;#039;s progress and make sure the program stays on track. At the end of the program, binders and DVDs of data are compiled and submitted to the relevant government agencies for certification before the vehicle can be sold to the public. It&amp;#039;s a whole lot more complicated than the old days, when you could just build something and sell it to the first person to show up with money in hand. The Road Ahead is an ongoing series of reports on where we&amp;#039;ve been, where we are, and where we&amp;#039;re headed as it pertains to cars, motorsports, and the culture surrounding it all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a4657/engineering-product/>