Quality has long been one of the major competitive advantages in
industrial products such as automobiles. But build quality has
become mandatory across the automotive field, and manufacturers now
search for new competitive advantages. An underestimated advantage
in the automotive world, which applies in fact to all producers of
consumer goods and services, lies in what clients perceive as
quality and not what the factory or R&D department considers
lack-of-defects build quality. The very definition of quality
therefore is evolving. The difficulty with the implementation of
"Perceived Quality'' in the engineering- oriented
automobile industry is an intrinsic, cultural reluctance to accept
apparently unmeasurable, subjective evaluation methods as opposed
to those widely recognized, seemingly objective methods used
today.
This paper will compare present quality evaluation methods with
the new perceptual approach. It will also discuss some of our
in-house research, both in design and in electronics, from the
development of the 1998 Lancia Dialogos Concept Car. The paper will
conclude with a look at future possibilities, with a key role for
electronics, in this exciting new, human-oriented approach to
automotive development.