Tag: Cadillac

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: 3-D Printing and the Future of Global Manufacturing

Now that much of the hype around 3-D printing has died down—no more of that 2010s-era talk about a Star Trek-style replicator in every home—a funny thing is happening to this technology. It’s becoming a widely used, and in some respects quietly revolutionary, update to the way that people manufacture and process things we rely on every day—from cars to industrial machinery to food. “What’s more, the way this technology is being used could have implications for the shape of global supply chains to come,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 14-15, 2023).

A quick refresher from Chapter 5 (see p. 290): 3-D printing, also known as “additive manufacturing,” generally works by adding tiny layers of material—usually powdered metal or plastic—one at a time to form an item, and fusing them with binding agents, lasers or other methods. Thus, parts are “grown” instead of forged, cast, molded, or machined as in traditional manufacturing. Just a decade ago, this kind of manufacturing was, with rare exceptions, suitable only for creating prototypes. What’s different now is that newer technology lets these systems print objects strong enough to be used in finished products—and relatively quickly.

Cadillac Celestiq’s new “ultra-luxury” $300,000+ vehicle has more than 100 3-D printed parts

Recently, for example, GM made 60,000 weatherproof seals using 3-D printing, in plastic, rather than making them the old-fashioned way, to make sure it could deliver its 2022 Chevy Tahoe on time. BMW is making broad use of 3-D-printed parts throughout its lineup. Mercury Marine is producing its newest V12, 600-horsepower outboard motor with 3-D-printed molds.

3-D printing is making rapid inroads into conventional manufacturing all over the world. Globally, the entire industrial additive-manufacturing market grew to $13 billion in 2022, from $5.7 billion in 2016. That growth should accelerate in the next 5 years, with the size of the industry reaching $37 billion by 2026, as industrial 3-D printing displaces traditional mass manufacturing.

Companies can also use 3-D printing to do away with some of their inventory of spare parts, many of which can sit on warehouse shelves for years. Both Caterpillar and Saudi Aramco, for example, are digitizing their libraries of old parts so that they can print them in 3-D as needed, when machines that may have working lives of decades break. During the pandemic, Caterpillar began using some 3-D printed parts, made in the U.S., in place of conventionally manufactured versions that had become difficult to import from India.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Explain the concept of “additive manufacturing.”
  2. Why does the new Cadillac have so many printed parts?