Reliability and Robustness Mindset in Automotive Product Development for Global Markets

As automotive competition is becoming more and more global, automotive products (vehicles or systems or components) are often developed in one market and made and/or used in other markets. The operating conditions are often different from one market to another market. If the market unique operating conditions are not considered in its development and manufacture process, the product may not fully perform its intended function over useful life period, and may experience fewer failure modes in one market but more or different failure modes in other markets.

This paper presents a Reliability Engineering approach, based on “Failure Mode Avoidance”, to the product development for global automotive markets. The approach includes three phases:

• Discover operating conditions (noise factors) and their potential failure modes
• Develop countermeasures to deal with the noise factors, and
• Verify the effectiveness of the countermeasures using Reliability Demonstration Matrix.

The Failure Mode Avoidance thinking process is called Reliability and Robustness Mindset.