3 weeks to 5 hours: what happened at Iveco Group

A single simulation ran 3× faster. The design loop around it collapsed from three weeks to five hours. The gap between those two numbers is where the real value sits, and it has nothing to do with compute speed.

Aerodynamics was a queue, not a design input

In heavy-duty vehicle development, aerodynamic analysis typically sits with a small group of specialists. A design question gets filed as a request, joins a queue, and comes back days or weeks later, usually after the decision it was meant to inform has already been made. Aerodynamics ends up confirming choices rather than shaping them.

For an OEM working toward lower CO₂ targets, that ordering is expensive in two directions. Every drag count left on the table is fuel consumption across a service life measured in hundreds of thousands of kilometres, real cost to the operator, and real exposure for the manufacturer as emissions targets tighten. And a late aero finding doesn’t just mean a missed optimisation. It means a change order against a frozen design, at the point in a programme where every fix costs more than it would have two months earlier.

The pilot

Iveco Group evaluated AeroCloud through Beyond Lab, its open innovation programme run in partnership with I3P, the Politecnico di Torino incubator, to test whether cloud aerodynamic simulation belonged inside heavy-duty vehicle development. Their engineers ran the platform directly through a structured testing phase, mapping it against their existing process and identifying the most relevant use cases for industrial vehicle aerodynamics.

Two numbers, and why they’re different

The simulation turnaround dropped by a factor of 3.

The engineering design loop dropped from 3 weeks to 5 hours.

These aren’t the same claim. Most of those three weeks was never compute time. It was waiting for specialist capacity to free up, for a request to be scoped correctly, for results to travel back to the team that asked. When Iveco’s engineers ran the studies themselves and trusted the output, that waiting time stopped existing.

Collaborating with Nablaflow team to test Aerocloud platform showed how effectively the solution can be used by different teams, enabling them to run simulations independently and get reliable results fast. Bringing it into early design stages helped cut iteration cycles, reduce risks, and speed up development.

*Alessio Sarcoli, Innovation & Advanced Engineering, Vehicle Concept, Iveco Group *

Three things in that sentence matter more than the speed: different teams, independently, and early design stages.

For us, this collaboration has been a strong validation demonstrating that AeroCloud can integrate into a complex engineering environment and be effectively used across teams. Significantly reducing simulation times highlights the tangible value of our solution.

*Luca Oggiano, Co-Founder and CEO, NablaFlow *

What this means for a commercial vehicle programme

A 3× faster simulation is a line in a procurement comparison. A programme where engineers no longer queue for aerodynamic answers is a different way of working: more variants evaluated before the design freeze, fewer decisions made without data, and specialist time redirected to the problems that genuinely require a specialist.

The commercial implication runs in both directions. Programmes that catch aero problems early avoid the change-order costs that come with late findings. Teams that can run more iterations in the same window evaluate more options, and the best option for a vehicle targeting lower CO₂ is rarely the first one that clears a feasibility check.

See how a design team runs its first heavy-duty study →