Industry 4.0 technologies have made immersive tools available to engineering design, while Industry 5.0 calls for human-centric, sustainable and resilient development processes. In automotive styling, proportion and surface assessment still relies largely on screen-based CAD and repeated physical prototypes, and virtual reality (VR) has not yet been embedded in a structured methodology such as Stylistic Design Engineering (SDE). Following a design science research approach, this study presents SDE 4.0, a VR-enabled extension of SDE in which full-scale immersive subdivision modelling introduces a human-in-the-loop review gate during modelling, followed by CAD/NURBS refinement, qualitative aerodynamic visualization, rendering and additive manufacturing. The workflow was demonstrated on a D-segment sport sedan and a derived Sport Wagon and evaluated through an indicative retrospective comparison with CAD-based SDE practice. The designer retrospectively estimated about four weeks of modelling effort and eight revision events for the two configurations, versus about four weeks and 20 events for a single vehicle in the CAD-based reference practice. These estimates derive from one project and one designer and do not establish statistically validated gains. CAD refinement remained necessary and represented the main interoperability bottleneck. A controlled validation protocol is proposed.
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Donnici et al. (2026) studied this question.
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