Designing the Donkervoort F22: from VR sketch to production in 2 years

Explore Gravity Sketch 6.6.4: updates to Spatial Alignments, screen selection tools, and more

Designing the Donkervoort F22: from VR sketch to production in 2 years

Please accept cookies to access this content

Tools used

Years of iteration, one car at a time

Donkervoort has been building handcrafted lightweight supercars in the Netherlands for 45 years, crafting around 50 cars per year. The family company builds each car to customer specification, and no 2 Donkervoorts are identical, with every exterior, interior, and engineering decision tailored to order. This model demands precision and craft, but it’s never been a fast process.

Jordi Wiersma, the Head of Design and Development at Donkervoort, knows these long design loops firsthand. Hand sketches led to scale models, scale models got 3D scanned, scans fed into CAD, CAD drawings went to the workshop, mockups came back with problems, and the whole cycle started again. The process to get to a physical model stage could take years, and each round of changes carries real costs.

The pandemic forced a new process

In 2021, Jordi was asked to work on the F22 project and it started the usual way: hand sketching, full-scale exterior mockups, interior bucks, 3D scanning. Then the global pandemic hit, and the team couldn’t fly between countries or work on physical models together anymore.

Some of the team had already been using Gravity Sketch independently, so they decided to try building the entire car in VR. Rather than feeling constrained by the new approach, the design process expanded. The team was generating 4 or 5 completely different car designs a week, exploring directions that wouldn’t have been feasible inside a traditional schedule. “We noticed that with Gravity Sketch we could probably do a complete design in a day, maybe 2 days,” Jordi says.

Over the course of the F22 project, the team explored 10 to 20 different design directions before committing to a single one to refine. What had started as a workaround became a fundamentally different way of working.

Donkervoort's new design workflow

The new workflow runs from the earliest loose sketches through to Class A surfacing, with Gravity Sketch anchored at the center and costly physical millings used only at key validation points.

• Step 1: Early hand sketching and concept input. The process still starts with hand sketches, but they’re quick doodles rather than polished multi-angle drawings. A sketch that used to require front, side, top, and 3-quarter views to understand how a design works in 3D now becomes a quick impression that gets taken straight into VR.
• Step 2: Rapid design exploration in Gravity Sketch. With CAD packaging data, drivetrain geometry, ergonomics constraints, and homologation inputs all loaded into the scene, Jordi builds full car designs directly in VR. A complete design direction, from scratch to something presentable, takes a day or 2.
• Step 3: Fast review cycles. With designs evolving daily, previous monthly review sessions couldn’t keep pace. The team shifted to a live feedback loop: LandingPad screenshots shared in a WhatsApp group, with responses from designers, management, sales, and marketing in near-real time. For designers with headsets, questions get resolved in VR Collab sessions, pointing at surfaces and pulling lines directly. By the later stages of the F22 project, the team was working together in Gravity Sketch Rooms almost daily.
• Step 4: Engineering integration throughout. Rather than handing off to engineering at the end of a design phase, Jordi now sends data to the engineering team almost daily. They overlay it against the packaging to check hard points and give feedback before significant time is invested in a direction. The conversations that used to start with “this won’t fit, you’ll need to redesign” now happen early enough to adjust without throwing away work.
• Step 5: Design verification milling. Once the team is happy with a direction, the Gravity Sketch mesh goes straight to CNC milling with no intermediate surfacing step. The milling gets evaluated in person: tape lines are applied, foam adjustments made to refine volumes and proportions, and the result is 3D scanned and brought back into Gravity Sketch.
• Step 6: Handoff to Alias and back again. The final Gravity Sketch model goes directly to Alias for Class A surfacing. The mesh quality from Gravity Sketch matched what the team would typically receive from a scanned clay model, making the handoff straightforward. Throughout surfacing, the Alias model is brought back into Gravity Sketch to check how headlights, details, and line work read at full scale in VR. The result is that Class A surfacing focuses on technical execution rather than design exploration.

A cleaner car, built faster, at lower cost

The F22 went from sketch to production in under 2 years. The design phase itself took a matter of months before tooling began, a timeline that would have been unimaginable under the previous workflow.

The visible difference is in the car itself. The F22 is a notable step forward in design refinement, with a cleaner surface language and fewer parts. That didn’t come from more budget or a bigger team. It came from being able to explore more directions, in more detail, without the time and cost ceiling that physical iteration had always imposed.