Reliability Follow-Up in the Pre-Production Process at Volvo Car Corporation

In the Product Engineering Division of Volvo Car Corporation, we have, since about 15 years, a special Quality Assurance Department Which is responsible for the Reliability Programme of the division There are four major activities involved in this programme (Fig. 1 describes roughly how they are connected): Specification of reliability levels. General reliability demands from the Product Planning Department (e.g. “Best in class”) are translated into technical terms (defaults per vehicle, L₅₀, probability of failure) by using competitor information from different marketing surveys, test results from motor magazines, own testing at VCC etc.Reliability analysis during the pre-production process to assure that the reliability requirements will be met. New designs and major design changes are analysed with techniques like FMEA and FTA. For this work, it is necessary to have field data and test results in order to make confident reliability assessments.The Long-term field follow-Up programme (LU) involves about 400 production cars per year model, from which repair data is collected and stored in a database. This gives us the possibility to measure the reliability level on the field, and see if it differs from the specifications. The LU programme is established since 10 years.Follow-up of pre-production test cars, the latest activity in the Reliability programme (started in 1986), which will be further described in this paper.Together, all these activities make a powerful tool for us at VCC to assure that the final output (i.e. cars to customers) will meet Volvo standards.