 Today, BMW unveils the all new iX, an electric crossover that looks freaking sweet. But instead of talking about the car, BMW sponsored this video to focus on the billion euro R&D headquarters that they just built to make designing cars like the iX as efficient as possible. Now Munich is freaking awesome. And under normal circumstances, I would have been happy to go out there again to check it out. But you guys know the drill, global pandemic, blah, blah. Thankfully, a German camera team was able to go in our stead and fire back a bunch of footage that ranged from insanely cool to... Martians playing golf, philosophers. Why did we get this? And for that matter, why does it exist? And we were given access to BMW's engineers to ask whatever questions we wanted. This is going to be a hell of a ride. A couple months ago, we were pretty happy with the driving simulator that we built. Big screen, comfy chair that moves around when you hit bumps and such. What more could you ask for? Oh, oh, yeah. That is on a whole other level. What you're looking at right now is a test of the Sight Acceptance Test High Fidelity Simulator, which has 400 square meters of play area to toss around its 83 tons of mass. The SAT High Fidelity Simulator is able to not just faithfully recreate the 0.65 Gs you'd get from launching an M3, but is actually able to accurately simulate the one G cornering force of a Formula E car. This combination of accurate longitudinal, transverse and rotational movements, along with BR glasses or a headset, allows BMW's engineers and test drivers to experience the feel of driving a car long before the first physical prototype is ever made. And some of you are probably thinking at this point, wow, Linus, 83 tons of mass being tossed around like that probably requires a lot of energy. And you'd be correct. The High Fidelity Simulator can consume up to six and a half megawatts of power delivered by freaking super capacitors. Now the full featured simulator isn't expected to be online until early to mid next year. But when it is and travels okay, BMW, call me. Now all this attention to making a car fun to drive might make people wanna drive rather fast in it, particularly in Germany. So BMW uses both active and passive safety features to help their customers avoid the woo woo mobile. Active safety features try to prevent a crash in the first place, like lane assists, emergency braking, and various self-driving modes. And these are great when you're daydreaming about retiring to a cranberry field, getting up each morning to overlook your beautiful bog when holy crap, there's a person. Active safety features are cool and all, but the testing of the passive features is a lot more fun to look at. The key to making a car crash as safe as possible is to design the structural layout of the car so that the outside can be destroyed and in the process dissipate enough energy to keep the driver inside safe. The engineers there said that the more contact area you have in a crash, the better. So fun fact, if you're cruising for a head-on bruising and you can't avoid the other car outright, a more direct impact means that the structures of the car will have their best chance of safely slowing you. Now the main crash test dummies used are called the hybrid three. They were originally developed by GM in the seventies, but have since been adopted by the Society of Automotive Engineers, making them the industry standard. But BMW has a full family of dummies with six adult sizes and four children. Another fun fact, while each one of these dummies costs more than the car they're strapped into, the test device for human occupant restraints, AKA Thor here, makes the rest of the crash testing costs look tame. It's worth as much as a house in Vancouver. The reason Thor is such an expensive boy is that he is extra packed with sensors to measure forces on the ribs. Thorax and other bones to determine the likelihood of harm to an actual human being in a given crash. Now, because Thor does his best work in the blink of an eye, getting good footage of him can be a bit of a challenge. That's where these 50 high-speed cameras come in. Each one of them records at either 1000 or 5000 frames per second, generating about one gigabyte of footage per test. Holy schnikes. And the 50 cameras aren't even my favorite thing in the room. Now, as you guys might know, getting good high-speed footage requires mirror-spoolbecklen-vul of light. For perspective, this right here is our brightest studio light. It consumes about 1000 watts of power. Hit me. Ah! Yep. That's pretty bright, all right. But at FIZ Nord, okay, you can put it away. It's hot too. They have 350 times as much light to make sure that they can clearly see all of the action. And you know what the best part of all this high-speed camera tech is? It's the redundancy. The crash test dummies are strapped with up to 192 signal channels to record acceleration, pressure, path, power, and so on. So basically, right after the crash, the engineers have all the data they need. The high-speed footage is then just used to verify all their findings. Want to know what's even crazier? Before the test even starts, the engineers know what the forces and all the sensors are going to be. Crashing the cars is already just verifying the numbers that they simulated. Man, computers are cool. What kind of computers, you ask? First, let's take a moment to appreciate the detail that's required for this type of simulation. A car will have about 12 million elements, 4,000 individual parts, and 8,000 screws and spot welds. Running a simulation like that, that's got to take days, right? Not if you have 120,000 CPU cores. Then it's more like five to 25 hours, depending on the test. Now, most of you have probably noticed that it feels like there's a bit of a lag between when fancy electronics get unveiled to the public, like a new GPU or a super snappy iPad, and when equivalent tech is available in cars. And there is a good reason for this. Verification. If a bit flips in your desktop gaming rig, the worst that can happen is a blue screen during a ranked siege match. In a car, well, there's a lot more at stake. This is why BMW now has four EMC, or electromagnetic compatibility testing halls. EMC testing is looking for two main things, that components aren't emitting too much electrical noise, and that their operation isn't influenced by outside electrical noise. According to the engineers, getting any individual component within spec is pretty easy. But these days, almost every component in the car has wires and electricity running to them, and the interaction of it all can get very complex. For example, the fuel pump is going to emit a little bit of electronic noise during operation, which you probably won't notice, unless that noise happens to be in the same frequency band as the radio, causing your favorite beats to disappear when you hit the gas. Each of the four EMC halls basically looks like a massive anechoic chamber, but instead of trapping noise, these walls are designed to trap any stray electromagnetic radiation. Behind the wall is shielding to prevent any outside electromagnetic radiation from getting in. Now the hall is designed to work between 150 kilohertz to six gigahertz, but measurements can be taken outside of those frequencies, just with less ideal test results. The benefits of this are twofold. The tests can be accurate without any reflections or outside interference, and also they aren't pumping electromagnetic noise across the rest of the facility. This is especially important when they're testing how the components hold up to external radiation. These antennas and signal generators basically turn the whole room into a massive microwave. Wiener Schnitzel anyone? In about every room in this building, there's probably an entire LTT videos worth of cool tech, but we only have so much time today, so let's quick fire around some of the other cool things. In the Workshop Testing and Measuring Building, or WPN, on the top floor, there are 100 test benches and 200 laboratories. On the second level, there are 12 large test benches that together pump about a thousand liters of hydraulic oil per minute, a 220 meter corridor, and an axle testing room. We weren't able to see all of this, unfortunately, largely because they're working on prototypes of vehicles that are a long way from even being announced in some of these rooms, but with the IX being the latest to finally see the light outside of the facility, gives me a lot of hope for the work that they're doing inside it. Of course, no high-tech lab is complete these days without some VR. This allows engineers, designers, and executives to get a much better idea of how sitting in the car will feel compared to looking at it on a screen. In particular, they said that this can be advantageous for designing leather work. In the past, this would be done on a physical model of the chair, but because the designs are constantly changing, by the time their designs are done, the dimensions of the chair might have changed. Well, now they're able to import accurate textures onto the latest 3D models, and then look at it in VR to make sure that it can hold up in both light and dark environments. And this is all powered by a top-tier gaming PC, or at least, well, it was top-tier when we got this footage. Hopefully, they're subscribed to LTT so they know how to upgrade it to Ryzen 5000 and one of the latest GPUs. Huge thanks to BMW again for sponsoring this video and letting us take a look inside their crazy facility. As I said before, when the time's right, I would really like to take another crack at this one, but actually driving the simulator instead. Think they'd let me do that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our last BMW video where I had a look at a sweet concept motorcycle that BMW put together.