An automobile may have been conceived as a conveyance. Still, for those who enjoy the pure thrill of driving fast — outside the racetrack — the Briggs Automotive Company (BAC) offers the Mono, which it claims is the only single-seat race-car-turned street-legal open cockpit car in the world.
The BAC Mono, basically a kit car, is capable of going 0-60 mph in 2.7 seconds with just a 2.5L engine. Like the race cars it emulates, it removes every shred of excess weight, such as passenger seats, a roof, etc., giving the 311 HP engine only 500 kilograms to work against.
BAC could sell the Mono on speed and novelty alone. By the end of 2022, 150 people had paid $200k to $280k to own one. We’ve yet to see one on the streets of San Francisco — or any U.S. street, for that matter — but have seen it several times at industry events.
First PLM
We see it at Realize LIVE 2025, where the cars’ exotic looks again draw a crowd. The first time we came across a Mono was in 2016 in Boston, where it was the star attraction at Autodesk’s Accelerate event, a small conference now defunct, devoted to Autodesk’s late entry into PLM, PLM 360.
Several Autodeskers at the conference expressed PLM 360 as an entry-level, cloud-based PLM solution, an alternative to Excel, which had become the inadvertent standard for firms too small for enterprise PLM. BAC was one of those firms. Another was TaylorMade, also presenting at the conference. Both were able to implement cloud-based PLM 360, though.
“PLM 360 is a total game changer,” said Neill Briggs, founding director of BAC. Briggs says his company had been using tools that were “pretty outdated,” though he doesn’t mention Excel by name.
Autodesk’s PLM 360 was to go through more name changes than an escaped felon. From PLM 360, to Fusion Lifecycle, to Fusion 360 Manage and then, as it is known today, Autodesk Fusion Manage. However, its capability may not have changed substantially, keeping it far from robust and trusted PLM solutions, according to SoftwareReviews.com, such as those from Dassault Systèmes (Enovia), Siemens (Teamcenter) and PTC (Windchill).
It’s All About Siemens Now
Perhaps it is no surprise that we see BAC in Siemens’ Realize LIVE 2025. On June 30, Siemens announced that BAC would use Siemens Xcelerator to build the next generation Mono. BAC will be using NX X, the company’s cloud-based version of NX design software. There was no mention made of dropping Autodesk’s PLM software, or any Autodesk software, for that matter, but it would be most unlikely that competing design and PLM platforms could coexist. A mixed system would be an IT and end-user nightmare.
In all fairness, it may not have been Autodesk’s PLM’s shortcomings that played a part in BAC’s defection. It may have been the lack of platform robustness for the complete automotive design and manufacturing cycle.
Neill Briggs now sings praises of Siemens software. In a Siemens video, he mentions BAC’s technical director, whose Formula One team used NX in the 90s for Formula One race car design, as did his Grand Prix team, as the driving force for the change.
The big aviation companies and big automotive companies are feathers in the caps of CAD and PLM vendors. When one of these big companies jumps from one PLM or CAD system to another, the “winner” is sure to issue a press release, or at least call a press conference. Such news will make headlines in the industry media. But defections are rare events and big companies are few, so software vendors scramble for lower-tier manufacturers and even novelty car companies like BAC. Why not? The Mono is still a showstopper.
The Road Map
Briggs Automotive Company may have gone as far as it could with Autodesk software. As the road map unfolds, BAC is confident that it will meet all its design needs with Siemens Xcelerator. The next generation Mono will face the mounting complexity of global vehicle homologation, and BAC puts its faith in Siemens’ Xcelerator suite—and specifically NX X—to embed regulatory requirements directly into their 3D CAD workflows. In Briggs’s words, this internalized framework “gives us new levels of confidence and a greater speed of development” when addressing diverse safety standards from headlamp placement to driver sightlines.
Totally transformative is Siemens’ Immersive Engineering platform, which BAC is leveraging to elevate the customer experience into an interactive, visceral engagement. Prospective buyers can virtually “sit in their seat fitting jig,” explore bespoke options in real time, and feel the emotional pull of seeing their tailored Mono rendered in lifelike detail before it’s built. As BAC’s product manager Eliot Marshall observes, the immersive preview XR provides “gets the fire burning within them”
A seamless digital thread that connects regulatory compliance with design, engineering agility and leads to customer — and event attendee — excitement. Siemens’ technologies will be sure to help BAC transform its radical vision — of a single-seat supercar built without compromising into a global, scalable reality.