How to Upgrade Vehicles? Release Planning in the Automotive Industry

Automotive manufacturers are facing highly dynamic customer demands and shorter life cycles forcing them to continuously upgrade their vehicles by releasing new versions with innovative features. Accordingly, manufacturers have to determine well-conceived release-strategies in order to upgrade existing vehicle models in their portfolio. The influence of accelerated technological progress and the digital transformation of today’s vehicles require novel release strategies in development and use stage of the vehicles. Here, traditional release-strategies of the automotive industry, for instance, by introducing facelifts or special editions, are becoming less effective and very limited compared to other branches such as the software industry. Therefore, this contribution aims to present the current practice of release planning in the automotive industry and the resulting recommendations. For this purpose, a comprehensive study was conducted, analyzing six vehicles from different brands of the upper-range segment in the German automotive industry between the years of 2009–2019 regarding their introduced releases and features as well as their impact on market success. Moreover, interviews were conducted in the automotive industry to gain an overview of the understanding, challenges, needs, and current processes of release planning in practice. Additionally, release strategies and principles from different branches (e.g. smartphone industry) were analyzed and compared. As a result, recommendations for appropriate release planning and strategies to upgrade vehicles were defined for the automotive industry.