Automotive 1.0 to 4.0 – Design Faster

The sector set for dramatic change over the coming decade and beyond is the automotive sector – Automotive 4.0

Now, I for one am not a big lover of driving and so when asked what my favorite car might be, I answer with an enthusiastic “the one I don’t have to drive!”. I’ll be first in line for the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) that allows me to use the time driving and focused on the road ahead, to instead do something more productive in the back seat.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of a beautiful car, incredible automotive engineering and technology and how over the coming years our lives will change as we travel from A to B. Watching the brands transform, new entrants disrupt and AI embed will be fascinating and being in the middle of it, leaves me almost wishing the years away to see it today.

What seems like way back, was 1.0 with the vertically integrated OEMs that mass-produced vehicles through to the creation of the major auto suppliers appearing on the global market and the overall improvement of both vehicle quality and performance in 2.0

3.0 saw the wide-ranging electrification and safety efficiency advancement to today’s 4.0 convergence of automobile, tech and communication to deliver autonomous, connected and shared mobility.

There’s so many disruptive forces in the sector already, but it looks like there’ll be a handful that will really reshape the sector. These forces are giving rise to four disruptive technology-driven trends: diverse mobility, autonomous driving, electrification, and connectivity.

Many would argue revenues in the sector are on the decline, however much of this is being offset, care of new revenue opportunities through car-sharing value multiples, on-demand mobility, data connectivity services including autonomous driving that delivers new forms of media and services. Combine these with ongoing macro-economic growth in the emerging economies and its easy to see the balance.

And similarly, like your mobile phone, the demand for upgradability in the automobile, albeit mainly software based, care of the constant change in technology.

He/She may be your “baby”, but he/she is about to raise him/herself to a new level of sophistication, care of the disruptive technology that will affect both your preferences and behavior.

You may even have a number of “loves”, care of multiple modes of transport to complete your journey. Going away for the weekend, you need a different vehicle; away for the night in the city and it’s different again. Gasoline / Power, Vehicle Maintenance and a switch of vehicle will not be fetched, but delivered.

As we start to share and perhaps subscribe to our mobility needs, individual vehicle designs will need to adapt to the increasing utilization, more robust demands, higher mileage and more comfort for multiple users.

McKinsey predicts by 2030 around 10% of vehicles on the road will be shared and at the same velocity, extended out to 2050 over 1/3rd.

Of course, much of these shifts will be driven around increasing city populations and more prevalent congestion charging, lack of parking and jams.

The high income cities meanwhile have more regulations around emissions and therefore will see the greatest uptake in autonomous and electric vehicles.

“A lot of time, people don’t know what they want, until you show it to them” Steve Jobs

That we know, but unless we understand the likes and dislikes as we evolve our demands as a race of people, it’s very hard to produce Customer-Experience Centric Products. The internet provides, of course the communication network to gather these desires.

And, the current state of the internet is Social Media that is fast developing as the primary communication source for most. We are being bombarded with new products every day, care of ever evolving technology and so the demands placed upon the automotive sector are unprecedented. We love something today but want something new tomorrow, because we know we can get it faster than ever before.

Automotive manufacturers have to find ways to personalize vehicles and to keep upgrading as the buyer or sharer expects it.

The average mass-production car manufacturer takes typically a minimum 18-months to design a new vehicle. This has to change to a more agile model.

The average design & styling department typically only use PLM design & manufacturing. The need to tap Requirements Management through a system that’s socially capable is the ideal way to respond to the true needs of the market and customer and a Product Innovation Platform, such as The 3DExperience Platform from Dassault Systemes, can capture this data for all to consume.

Providing that single-source of data and intelligence, when enhanced with customer feedback delivers an unstoppable design.

A Social Internet (Media) capable PLM system should deliver on the following goals:

• The ability to collate and consolidate user feedback and information from diverse sources.
• The ability to analyze, structure and substantiate unstructured information.
• The ability to mine and summarize information from a large data pool that has been acquired by ethical web crawling.
• The ability to logically map the requirements against the bill of materials/ items/ subsystems.
• The ability to quickly build templates/questionnaires that can be either broadcast or published to a large user base.
• The ability to capture demographics and psychographics.
• The ability to obtain diagnostic and usage information from the product itself using Internet of Things (IoT) platforms (e.g., sensors and other ambient forms of data collection).

Creating concepts and prototypes via the Digital Twin is the ideal flexible and fast way to try a product and even more so with the introduction of AR and VR, before pushing onto the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), out in the field with the customer.

Always appreciate your time-out to read this and any thoughts or comments you may have.

My best wishes, Andrew