Sometimes, great ideas come from casual talks. You don’t realize right away what’s going on, and suddenly it’s there.
The idea came from a disabled friend working at DS. This friend, Vincent, had a passion for sports cars. The day he could afford one, he didn’t resist. Although he can drive a classic car without a special system, he faced a problem while driving his new marvel on a performance circuit.
Off-the-shelf systems available on the market didn’t quite fulfill Vincent’s needs. Therefore, he decided to design one of his own and teamed-up with a lifelong friend who was an onboard electronic wizard.
As a DS employee, Vincent could access CATIA 3D CAD Software for free. He then designed a revolutionary system during his spare time. The two friends quickly came up with the brilliant idea of moving the clutch control to the stick shift knob. So instead of using his left foot, the driver uses an electronic control integrated into the stick shift. Clutch control at your fingertips!
The system – named Neoclutch- was designed and fully studied with CATIA before the first tests on the track, which proved fully successful.
Vincent was a close friend of the Interactive Media team. We found his adventure quite original and also a significant example of the power and ease of use of CATIA. We then decided to put Neoclutch on our website.
At that time, I was looking for a way to produce dynamic, different content for our website. I wanted something that could show that our group, though big and powerful, still retained the start-up spirit that fueled Dassault Systèmes when it was created. Something that would reflect the enthusiasm of our teams for 3D and high-tech in general.
That’s when I had the flash: there must be thousands of Vincents around. The problem is that they can’t access CATIA for free. Let’s give them a chance to have it and see what happens! Passion for Innovation was born.
The Neoclutch project naturally became the pilot project to introduce the concept, and has been followed by other projects that you can discover on the Passion for Innovation section on our website.
In another post, I’ll tell you more about the program’s philosophy and its evolution.
Keep 3D-ing!
Regards,
Rich
