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Modern development in the automotive industry is strongly effected by fast turnaround times due to shorter development cycles for every new product. This leads to a reduction of more and more prototypes. Under these challenging circumstances traditional, hardware based development approaches often reach their limits. Together with new CAE tools the lack of resources and information can be faced. This paper will describe how CFD simulation (Computational Fluid Dynamics) cooperates with traditional wind tunnel tests to reduce cost and provide even more valuable information. The efficient combination of both tools is the key for best aerodynamic optimized vehicles. In CFD the external aerodynamics of a certain styling (aerodynamic coefficients, flow field visualization) is generated even before any hardware prototypes are available. This allows the development engineer to rank different styling studies and a pre-optimization of selected themes prior to wind tunnel testing.