Developing Technology Strategies for Flexible Automotive Products and Processes

Flexibility provides a way to address technological progress and changing user needs in a vehicle’s architecture. Yet, this has serious implications on the development and manufacturing process. It necessitates additional investments in long-lasting interfaces and changeable production design. Within this paper, we address the research question “which components of a vehicle should be designed flexible and which parts can remain static to streamline investments in flexibility?”. We develop a methodology to support this decision by combining technology intelligence methods with comprehensive user acceptance research. Our approach builds upon a certain notion of function, which connects technological progress with customer utility. To this end, we analyze patents to evaluate technology dynamics and a user survey to detect functional needs. The research project FlexCAR designs a flexible vehicle architecture and was used for evaluation. Thereby, the methodology showed significant and sound results in its application and revealed flexible components with little effort. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first methodology of its kind.