GO through a set of double doors beside the office of Paul Jennings, associate professor at the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), and you think you have taken a wrong turn and ended up in the car park.

Facing you is a Jaguar saloon, slotted neatly across one end of the room. In front of it is a screen, and dotted round it pieces of scientific apparatus.

This Jaguar is regularly driven as part of Jennings’s work – but its engine never starts and it never moves. Instead, drivers are fed simulated sounds as they “drive”, sounds made from a complicated mix of artificially generated noise and recordings of real cars.

The aim is to find out what drivers think about sounds, how they react to them, and what they like and don’t like. “If you put your foot down to overtake on a motorway, you don’t want silence,” said Jennings.

Work by Warwick’s “experiential-engineering” department has helped carmakers tune engines and exhaust systems – an aggressive rasp for the sports car, a muted purr for the limousine.

WMG, part of Warwick university, is best known for its work with automotive and aerospace companies, but now it is looking to broaden its approach. It is spending heavily on a new “digital laboratory”, a facility that will draw together teams from different fields to study IT and digitisation problems for industry.

The building, which opens in March, will cost £13m, but with contributions expected from corporate partners and development agencies, a total of about £50m will be invested.

WMG is in talks with BAE Systems, GE Healthcare, IBM, Dassault Systemes, SAP, Symantec, Jaguar / Land Rover and Tata about them becoming partners.

The digital lab will eventually have a staff of about 500 and planning is already in hand for a second building.

Lord Bhattacharyya, WMG founder and director, said the initiative was spurred by the importance of digital systems to industry and public-sector clients. “Almost everything these days is digital – obviously in high-tech sectors like computing and telecommunications, but also in aerospace, automotive, health and education,” he said.

Bhattacharyya said he was also persuaded of the need for the facility by the multidisciplinary nature of the problems WMG’s clients wanted investigated.

“I could just have appointed a professor of digital systems. But that’s not really going far enough. You need a critical mass of people and skills so that you can bring an in-depth approach,” he said.

An example? Like the work already being done on people’s reactions to the sound a car makes, Bhattacharyya envisages using neuroscience to probe their tastes even further.

“When people get into a car, they react in different ways to the way it looks, smells and feels. So why can’t we do brain scans to look at just what is happening there – what is the exact reaction to this kind of seat covering compared with another.

“This is where the neuroscientists can come in and help us. It is all about a digital characterisation of problems.”

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