Bridgestone, a global leader in premium tyres and sustainable mobility solutions, has reached a key milestone in its digital tyre development journey with its state-of-the-art driving simulator becoming fully operational.

Installed at the company’s R&D Centre near Rome, Italy, the VI-grade DiM500 Driver-in-the-Loop (DiL) simulator enables Bridgestone to assess tyre performance in a fully virtual environment.

“Bridgestone is already considered a pioneer in digital tyre development – leveraging Virtual Tyre Development for more than a decade. By integrating the driver into the digital development cycle, this investment adds a crucial new piece to our evolving ecosystem,” said Mattia Giustiniano, R&D Senior Vice President at Bridgestone West. “The simulator’s introduction marks a significant step in enhancing the efficiency and sustainability of our R&D processes, while unlocking unprecedented opportunities to foster innovation.”

The simulator features a large mobile platform with a five-metre range of motion and a carbon-fibre cockpit, immersing the driver in a hyper-realistic environment that imitates real-world driving. This range of motion enables the reproduction of forces equivalent to physical tests, allowing for highly accurate analysis.

Combining high-fidelity simulations with subjective driver feedback – alongside historical data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies – this new capability allows for earlier and more accurate design decisions. It enables Bridgestone to evaluate a significantly larger number of tyre specifications than traditional physical testing and in less time, across a broader range of conditions. Physical testing, which remains a crucial part of Bridgestone’s development process, can now be reserved for the final stages of tyre validation.

Bridgestone’s new DiL simulator significantly reduces the need for physical tyre prototypes. Its introduction is expected to save up to 12,000 experimental tyres annually, contributing to a substantial decreased environmental impact.

Bridgestone’s Virtual Tyre Development (VTD) technology already enables a reduction of up to 60 per cent in raw material consumption and CO2 emissions in the development phase of original equipment tyres.

The integration of the DiM500 simulator also accelerates time to market by enabling tyres and vehicles to be developed in parallel. This supports closer collaboration with vehicle manufacturers, further strengthening Bridgestone’s ability to custom-engineer tyres that maximise each vehicle’s performance potential.

While the simulator mainly supports dry handling evaluations, it is also being expanded to assess a broader range of performance conditions. Backed by Bridgestone’s industry-leading investment in R&D globally, this work will further strengthen the company’s ability to meet the evolving needs of vehicle manufacturers and end-users.