WCX 2025: Luminary Cloud Debuts Foundational Datasets for Aerodynamic Sims

The new Shift SUV model “is the world’s first Physics AI model and dataset designed for automotive SUV aerodynamic analysis," the company said.

April 6, 2025

Chris Clonts

A view of the SUV foundation model in Lumninary Cloud’s platform. (Luminary Cloud)

Luminary Cloud this week announced Shift Models, a suite of foundation constructs for its engineering simulation platform, at the WCX 2025 event in Detroit, Michigan.

In a news release, the company said that the initial Shift SUV model “is the world’s first Physics AI model and dataset designed for automotive SUV aerodynamic analysis.” The company worked with GPU maker NVIDIA and Honda to develop the models.

Physics AI is Luminary Cloud’s virtual wind tunnel, and can help marry design aesthetics to performance characteristics. The company envisions designers and engineers being able to perform real-time aerodynamic analyses early in the design process.

The release indicated that the development of Shift Models was a reaction to the lack of modeling available for SUVs, the always hot market segment that accounts for 48% of global sales.

Luminary Cloud CEO Pete Schlampp said the new datasets could alter auto design methodology. “By providing instantaneous, physics-informed aerodynamic feedback, our open-source model enables designers and engineers to collaborate more effectively at the earliest stages of development,” he said, “enabling innovation” while also saving time and money.

The Shift SUV model came from several thousand geometry variants created by the AeroSUV open-geometry model with Luminary Cloud’s computational fluid dynamics platform. The company’s release asserts that the AI-based workflow is superior to traditional design approaches due to its avoidance of “cumbersome workflow steps.”

At launch, the model is trained on around 1,000 simulations. The company has a goal of advancing to 25,000 by the end of 2025. The dataset in Luminary Cloud’s model will be open-source.

Luminary Cloud emerged from stealth mode early in 2024. Ian Lockley, Luminary Cloud’s principal solutions engineer, told SAE Media that the company’s physics simulations impressed a potential automotive customer who asked them to run a blind test analyzing a transient aeronautics simulation. The customer’s previous effort to run the simulation took them 24 hours.

On the company’s platform, the simulation took only 60 minutes.