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The ability to quickly design new vehicles with optimal crashworthiness has long been a goal of automotive manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers alike. This paper takes steps towards that goal by automating manual design iterations. The crashworthiness of an instrument panel was optimized using LS-OPT. In one design experiment, optimizing the gauges of non-styled parts in the instrument panel reduced the simulated force in a Bendix test setup by around 30%. In a second design experiment, optimizing the shape of non-styled parts in the instrument panel with a parametric preprocessor enhanced the simulated crashworthiness by around 20%. In a third design experiment, the design space was increased and an additional 7% improvement in simulated crashworthiness was found. The designs were generated several times faster and were less expensive to evaluate than with previous manual methods.