OEM Reuse Expectations and Implications for New Automotive Electronic Systems 2004-21-0013

OEMs are faced with the conflicting goals of creating vehicles with higher reliability, increased feature content, lower model runs, reduced cost, and shorter lifecycles. This is especially critical with electronic systems due to the continued increase in the number of electronic systems in our vehicles, and the historical short lifecycle of enabling technologies.

One important strategy is the reuse of architectures, best practices, knowledge, hardware and software designs, subsystems, and even actual parts across vehicles. Automotive electronic system reuse can be viewed from three dimensions.

First are common, standardized “plug & play” parts which the customer never sees, like connectors and horns.

Second are the “architectural” subsystems, which are reused among vehicles on the same platform, like modules.

Finally, there are reuse strategies around creating flexibility for styling while reusing the strategic elements of the system (clusters, radios). Taken to its fullest extent, reuse of common and standardized interfaces allows styling flexibility for the parts, which the customer interacts with, like lighting.

Implications to the supply base are profound. They include the ability to decouple sourcing decisions from program timing for some components and defer others to take advantage of consumer trends; the need by OEMs for more design control; and the demand by OEMs for suppliers to create and participate in these strategies, including work on standardization of components. Supplier selection criteria continue to focus on performance.