when we met Sterling Anderson in 2024He was the chief product officer at Aurora, the self-driving startup he co-founded in 2016 after several years at Tesla. However, a little over a year ago, Anderson left the startup world for something a little more established, taking on the role of chief product officer at General Motors, the country’s largest automaker. Since then, he’s had a good look at how GM is entering what he calls the third era of engineering and design.
“There was a time when humans looked at birds and said, ‘Okay, those wings seem to work pretty well. Let’s design something that looks like them,'” Anderson said, describing the first era of engineering. “And they just repeated their path toward something that was marginally feasible.”
The first few hundred years of invention “was this era of highly empirical, iterative design engineering and development,” he said. “And by that I mean that humans largely started with what we know or had seen, built prototypes of something that looked similar and maybe tweaked a few things, hoping it would work better, tested it, iterated on it, and went through this slow process of guessing and checking until we came up with something that worked marginally.”
The second era began when computers became powerful enough to do some of the initial work. “We started to see that virtual development tools, in functionally specific ways, improved the work that people did so that they didn’t have to resort to empirical prototypical development,” Anderson said.
“For example, we’re starting to see CFD (computational fluid dynamics) start to inform aeronautical engineers,” he said. “We saw FEA (finite element analysis) informing structural engineers. We saw many other virtual tools… but the relay race that developed remained the same, that is, design passed the baton to aerodynamics, which in turn passed the baton to the structures, but always passed the baton back when they found something that the others needed to fix.”
