Assessing the Economic Viability of Advanced Vehicle Technologies

All over the world, there are currently many advanced vehicle technology development efforts underway to improve fuel economy or exploit alternative fuel sources. These efforts range from reduced mass body structures to advanced powertrain architectures. In additional to the technical and performance hurdles, these efforts also face economic obstacles if they are ever to compete with and replace conventional vehicle concepts.

As far as the manufacturing economics for many advanced technologies are understood at all, most are likely to be more expensive than conventional vehicles in the near term. In order to intelligently invest in new technology development, the entire life cycle economic costs and benefits must be assessed so that the eventual return on investment, if one even exists, can be known.

This paper addresses a methodology for comparing both the up front manufacturing costs and the operation life cycle costs for conventional and advanced vehicle technologies.