Tag: auto design

Teaching Tip: The Auto Design Life Cycle

1959 Cadillac

In both Chapters 2 and 5 we discuss product life cycle and its strategic importance. In Figure 2.5 (page 40), we identify ten products that are passing through the 4 stages of Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline.

Here is an 11th example you can use in class –automobiles–whose changes you can follow through these stages. We start with the 1950’s land yachts like the Cadillac Eldorado.  This was followed by the 1960’s station wagons. Socioeconomic shifts drove Americans’ move out of gas-guzzling embellished cars and into tiny, economical Japanese imports following the oil crises and new tailpipe emissions standards of the 1970s. Then came the 1980s minivan (which almost totally replaced station wagons). In the 2000s, the sport-utility vehicle spurred the minivan’s retreat.

The SUV has devoured the American car market, now accounting for nearly 60% of new vehicles purchased. Stricter vehicle-efficiency standards and governments’ push toward electrification challenge the supremacy of the blunt, heavy SUV. And car designers are tired of drawing them. “We all get bored to death because it’s absolutely ubiquitous,” says GM’s lead designer in The Wall Street Journal (June 13, 2024).

The Zoox electric self-driving urban ‘Toaster.’

The ever-expanding options, along with higher interest rates, are pricing younger and lower-income consumers out of the market. The average new-car price is now nearly $50,000. This has automotive designers, executives and analysts focused on a big question: What comes after the SUV? Will the boxy SUV be followed by even boxier forms?

Electric vehicles have no need for hoods, as their batteries are typically mounted in the floor, and their motors are near the wheels. With no drivers, upcoming autonomous vehicles won’t need dashboards or steering wheels. Executives think that maximizing human and cargo space in such vehicles results in a rounded box on wheels: a nouveau vanlike form nicknamed “the Toaster.”   GM research has shown that this spacious shape can provide passengers in autonomous vehicles more confidence in surrendering control. “It’s more distance between you and a potential accident. The shape also has a “functional, happy character,” adds GM’s designer.

OM in the News: Using AI to Design New Cars

Researchers have found that machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly reduce cost and time in product design (the topic of Chapter 5), not only in the actual generative design of the product, but also in the predictive analysis of whether consumers will be attracted to certain designs.

Toyota is using AI to design better cars faster

“It’s well understood in the automotive industry that aesthetics are critically important to market acceptance. An improved aesthetic design has demonstrated that it can boost sales 30% or more,” says a Yale U. prof (see INFORMS.org Dec. 11. 2023). “That’s why automakers are known to invest over $1 billion in the design of a single model.”

The current auto design process relies on the conventional human development of designs and prototypes, along with in-person testing of possible designs with actual consumers. These consumer evaluations feature what is called the A/B testing of alternative designs in laboratory test markets. The industry calls them “theme clinics,” in which hundreds of targeted consumers are recruited and brought to a central location to evaluate aesthetic designs. Consumers are asked to rate the designs based on established benchmarks, such as scales for “sporty,” “appealing,” “innovative” and “luxurious,” among other characteristics.

Auto makers invest more than $100,000 per theme clinic for one new vehicle design. Because there are multiple aesthetic designs per vehicle, and more than 100 vehicles in its product line, General Motors alone, for example, spends tens of millions of dollars just on theme clinics.

Researchers found ways to augment the traditional product development process with machine learning tools that address both the generation of the design itself, and the testing of possible consumer acceptance or rejection of the design. They developed a generative model that creates new product designs and allows designers a tool to morph potential designs more efficiently and effectively. Their predictive model helps identify those designs with high aesthetic scores. They created their models using data from an auto firm, using images of 203 SUVs that were evaluated by targeted consumers, and 180,000 high-quality unrated images.

With advancements in machine learning algorithms and computer vision technology, AI is also capable of predicting safety risks on roads by analyzing data from sensors attached to vehicles.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What does A/B testing mean?
  2. Why is AI a valuable tool in design of cars–and other consumer products?

OM in the News: Ford Goes Greener for Plastics

By 2011, all North American Fords have used soy-based foam in their seats

“What does Heinz Ketchup have to do with plastics and Ford Motor,” asks Plastics Technology (March 1, 2018). It’s not that the squeeze bottles used for the condiment are found throughout Ford cafeterias. Rather, the automaker and the ketchup maker are working together on finding the ways and means to use the skins from 2 million tons of tomatoes that Heinz processes each year as fillers in composite materials that would be used by Ford for vehicle components.

Looking for alternatives for “conventional” plastic materials is nothing new at Ford. Back in the 1940s Ford experimented with using soy beans as a source of plastics. Now, there isn’t a single new North American-produced Ford vehicle that doesn’t use soy oil for the production of foam that is used for seat cushions, seat backs and headrests. The company started using soy oil for the seats in the 2008 Mustang. This is non-trivial, because on average there are 40 pounds of foam in a vehicle.

Ford has been developing a variety of materials that are: (1) natural, and (2) not typically otherwise used. It started working with forest product giant Weyerhaeuser, which had seen the use of its pulp products in the U.S. diminish as paper production moved off shore. They began testing the use of cellulose fibers from trees, and in 2010 those fibers replaced glass in the Lincoln armrest. Not only did the material meet the functional and aesthetic requirements, but because the natural fibers are less dense, they were able to reduce the weight of the part. There are now 8 bio-based materials used in Fords. These include coconut-based composite materials and recycled cotton used for carpet and seat fabrics.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What other components are carmakers using that are sustainable?
  2. What are the driving factors in this endeavour?

OM in the News: One Thing Isn’t New in Car Design

 

Ford modelers work on a clay prototype of the Mustang
Ford modelers work on a clay prototype of the Mustang

When it comes to designing high-tech cars, writes The Wall Street Journal (June 2, 2014), auto makers still depend on clay models sculpted by hand—a craft that goes back to the industry’s early days. Designs for a new car may start with a simple sketch on a cocktail napkin. Sketches get turned over to a digital modeler, who fits the lines of the drawing over a digital rendering of the car’s engine, suspension and other chassis parts. The idea then goes to a clay modeler to be transformed into a series of clay models, usually starting with sculpture 4/10 the size of an actual car. But despite use of 3-D imaging technology that allows executives to see a virtual vehicle, the top brass at Ford won’t sign off on producing a new car until they see full-size physical models.

The pressure to produce new designs more rapidly intensified when competition in the auto industry went global. During the 1990s, auto makers boasted about how quickly they could bring new vehicles to showrooms as they slashed product-development times from 5 years to under 2 years by relying more heavily on CAD tools. The rapid decline in the cost of computing power moved the auto industry closer to a world where the mathematical models of a car’s exterior and interior surfaces could go directly to computer-driven machines that cut dies and molds for production. The problem, says Ford’s design head, is “digital projections can’t accurately show how light will play on a car’s surface.”

Once designers have a model about 60% right, they use an optical scanner to translate the clay scale model into a package of digital data. Milling machine can produce a full-size clay replica in one day. The clay-to-digital, digital-to-clay approach is now common. Designs go back and forth between clay and digital renderings, and are integrated with digital representations of the car’s chassis and other mechanical components.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Relate this approach to the 6 issues for product design in Chapter 5 (see pages 165-166).

2. Why isn’t auto design all digital?

OM in the News: The Revolution in Vehicle Design

Design software produces ideal shapes for vehicle parts like this motorcycle frame
Design software produces ideal shapes for vehicle parts like this motorcycle frame

A revolution in vehicle design that has been sweeping the auto industry, writes The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 21, 2013) . Advances in computer-aided engineering (CAE) and big investments in computing power have given manufacturers new tools to create designs and the ability to test their ideas in a fraction of the time and at far less cost than they could before. The result: many more design ideas are being conceived and tested, and the best are being adopted quickly, helping manufacturers improve the fuel efficiency and their vehicles. “This new process is allowing us to do a lot of innovation,” says Ford’s head of CAE.

Car makers are using computers to run through dozens of design possibilities in the time it once took to produce a single prototype. Only a few years ago, it might have taken as long as 8 months to get from the idea for a new cylinder head to the building of a prototype, and it would have cost millions of dollars. Today, the part is created in a computer simulation that comes up with the most efficient design possible. Engineers then alter that design to account for manufacturing constraints and test the revised design virtually in models that use decades of data on material properties and engine performance as a guide. The firm then creates the mold to make a real part that can be bolted onto an engine for further testing. The entire process takes days instead of months and costs only thousands.

In the past 4-5 years, car makers have been ditching physical prototypes as computer simulations of real-world conditions improved. Costs, performance and safety designs have been digitized so they can be weighed by design programs. The vehicle can be built, run through snow banks, started in frozen or hellishly hot conditions and crashed repeatedly—all inside a network of computers.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is CAE such an important OM tool?

2. What role does simulation now play in vehicle design?