In order to minimize the development and production costs in the automotive industry, despite steadily increasing variety of models and applications offered by the OEMs, the pressure on standardization of components and production processes is increasing continuously. As a direct consequence, modular engine families are already established with high degrees of common parts and kits as well as standardized interfaces for all vehicle platforms by most manufacturers these days.
At the same time, the world adopted and announced massive legal demands concerning the reduction of CO2 emissions for the entire vehicle fleet. In addition to the optimization of the combustion process, the exhaust gas aftertreatment and thermal management, the use of improved and more resilient materials for higher reduction of mechanical friction leads to a significant amount of the realized lowering in fuel consumption respective CO2 emissions. Significant future potential for friction reduction and loss minimization is expected to result from, for example, one for the particular application optimized, on-demand component dimensioning and tailored calibrations. This dedicated fine-tuning approach is contrary to the widely spread application of a clear common part strategy.
In the course of this paper the question will be discussed whether the additional cost of a component diversification can be justified within an engine family in contradiction to a best cost approach by using the scaling effects of parts communization.