For most of the history of design, designers have relied on their intuition and/or improving previous models to design their new models. Most designs could not be tested as analytical formulae could not be used for real problems. Only in these last few decades finite element analysis has been used. Optimization as a design tool only in the recent years has started to be used more commonly in the marketplace. Structural optimization software has only been available in the last two decades, but some of the optimization that software offers today did not even exist ten years ago. The novelty of these techniques shows that the potential of structural optimization is not yet fully utilized. In this paper we will discuss some examples that show what is possible for car body design. First, we will summarize the general methods and then, we will show examples for car body design.