Digital Design Tools Survey 2025

Digital design tools are increasingly critical to the car design process. Accelerating product development lifecycles, the need for improved quality, reduced costs, and eradicating manufacturing errors are all driving increased investment and focus upon digital design tools. Furthermore, exciting new technologies such as VR, AR, and especially AI are now entering the digital design tools vernacular. To map this dynamic landscape, and understand the opportunities digital design tools create within the car design industry, we conducted the CDN / Autodesk Digital Design Tools Survey 2025 in partnership with leading digital tools provider, Autodesk.

The findings capture a clear industry perspective, offer actionable insights, and provide a deep dive analysis of how digital design tools are shaping the car design industry.

Key findings

1. Shorter product development time is a priority for speed to market

Accelerating the overall design process (67%) was identified as a clear priority for users of digital design tools identifying how saving time, and reducing product development times is a top priority.

This was followed by Enhancing collaboration between cross-functional teams (55%), Increasing the use of AI and machine learning to optimise design (54%), Improving design accuracy and reducing errors (53%), and Integrating with other digital systems for a more comprehensive design-to-production workflow (50%), again reinforcing the point about accelerating the entire design process and speed to market.

2. Collaboration, connectivity and compatibility with other software / workflows is key

Enhancing collaboration between cross-functional teams (55%) was identified as one of the leading factors when it came to the role of digital tools within the automotive design process. Particular importance was also placed upon how the different software systems connected at each stage of the design process and were compatible across the entire workflow.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI), AR and VR are playing an increasingly critical role

Accelerating the design process, allowing rapid iterations, and automating routine design tasks or to meet complex regulatory requirements are major features of AI. For example, generative AI’s ability to rapidly create 3D models from 2D sketches, quickly establishing how aerodynamic the vehicle is and also enhancing its beauty. By training the AI with customer-specific data, the model can take into consideration the design language of a particular brand.

The survey results confirmed this with Automating routine design tasks to allow designers to focus on creativity (69%) as the leading response by far.

This was followed by a broader range of second level roles for AI and digital tools including Refining the aerodynamics and performance through AI-based optimisations (48%), Reducing the time and cost required for physical prototyping (48%), Enhancing virtual collaboration among global design teams (48%), indicating that there are actually a spectrum of considerations.

The digital design tools survey also includes insightful findings around:

• Improvements in digital tools

• Virtual reality (VR) & augmented reality (AR)

• Digital tools impact

• Role of digital tools

• Role of AI & digital tools

• Future role of digital tools

• AI assisted image to 3D model generation

• AI assisted reverse engineering (from scan to SubD)

• AI powered rapid environment creation for reviews in VRED

• AI powered features in digital tools software