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The rapid growth of electronic feature content within the vehicle continues to challenge the automotive industry. Customers want cutting edge consumer electronics features in a vehicle before the features are obsolete. However, automotive manufacturers continue to struggle with introducing new features into vehicles before they become obsolete to the customer. The ability for automotive manufacturers to seamlessly upgrade existing products with new and improved products continues to plague the automotive industry. Vehicles traditionally take 4 plus years to design and manufacture. Automotive manufacturers need to plan consumer electronics features early, but not actually integrate those into the vehicle until late in the design cycle, possibly on the production line. This would help facilitate providing the most recent features.

Consumers always seem to want more features, better reliability, and increased value. Regulations seem to grow ever more detailed and competitors are constantly raising the stakes by implementing new innovations. This coupled with the fact that automotive manufacturers are constantly trying to reduce cost and weight of the vehicle, makes the task of designing a vehicle even more challenging. One of the major contributors to the vehicles cost and weight is the electrical/electronics system. Designing a vehicle's electrical/electronic system is a complex task with many constraints (e.g., cost, timing, manufacturing, assembly, weight, quality, reliability, serviceability, industry standards, brand image, etc). Analyzing and understanding all of these constraints and alternatives is how the vehicle's electrical/electronic system should be designed. In this paper, the constraints that need to be considered when designing a vehicle's electrical/electronic system will be discussed.

The rapid growth of vehicle feature content continues to challenge automotive designers. The total vehicle feature content seriously impacts the manufacturing complexity of any single vehicle. Traditional strategies for introducing new features into high-content luxury vehicles before moving the feature into economy vehicles have been undermined by the fast moving consumer electronics field. The challenge for automotive OEM and Tier 1 suppliers is to optimize the vehicle architecture in order to provide more efficient means of introducing features expediently and efficiently. Therefore, any production vehicle's Electrical, Electronic, & Software (EES) architecture must successfully support modular sourcing, modular assembly, global manufacturing schemes, cost and weight issues.