Global Vehicle Architectures Development in the Automotive Industry

Competition among car makers increases each day, as such companies look forward to launching new vehicle models which meet the different consumer niche. As a result, developing different vehicles simultaneously is a market requirement, and doing so might lead to increased production costs in case no appropriate developing and launching strategy is applied. Upon this scenario, the platform strategy has been a practice among car makers for decades and has promoted both standardization and reuse of vehicle components and systems. The most recent global architecture strategy has been used by some of the world car makers, combining communization and standardization to increased flexibility if compared to the conventional platform, which represents a higher number of derivative vehicles as well. The objective of this work is to identify the relevant variables taken into consideration when selecting an appropriate strategy for developing a new global vehicle.