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The fulfillment of the strict market requirements for customers in the “off-road” vehicles segment is crucial to increase the value and reliability of the products and services available by a manufacturer of heavy-duty vehicles. The need for a product that meets these demands becomes an outstanding factor of a manufacturer, since it provides active customer care services, aiming at the preventive and/or corrective “in loco” maintenance for its vehicles and equipment. This work proposal encompasses the development, manufacturing and management, by its dealers, of a remote maintenance unit (RMU), customized and configured with all the equipment required to support active maintenance services, both preventive and corrective, in the operation/work region of the customer. Thus, the target is the minimization of the running time of its vehicles and/or equipment to the nearest service station, or even of the wait time for concluding a service.

Competition among car makers increases each day, as such companies look forward to launching new vehicle models which meet the different consumer niche. As a result, developing different vehicles simultaneously is a market requirement, and doing so might lead to increased production costs in case no appropriate developing and launching strategy is applied. Upon this scenario, the platform strategy has been a practice among car makers for decades and has promoted both standardization and reuse of vehicle components and systems. The most recent global architecture strategy has been used by some of the world car makers, combining communization and standardization to increased flexibility if compared to the conventional platform, which represents a higher number of derivative vehicles as well. The objective of this work is to identify the relevant variables taken into consideration when selecting an appropriate strategy for developing a new global vehicle.

The competition among automotive industries increases each year worldwide. Among their diverse needs, what can be highlighted are: market expansion, model diversification, competitive prices, customer-recognized quality, new products release in shorter time periods, among others. The occurrence of flaws that might compromise the health or safety of the product’s user is admittedly one of the largest issues for any manufacturer, especially if these flaws are identified after its commercialization (recall). In this work, a study on recall in the automotive industry in the Brazilian market will be presented, comprising the years of 2013 and 2014. Reasons and causes of recall are addressed, based on the sample of the aforementioned research, with special emphasis on flaws derived from the production process. The conclusion at the end of the work is that the final assembly in the automotive manufacturing process is what requires more attention from engineering area.

Brazil for more than two decades is the largest producer of civilian armored vehicles in the world, where in 2018 almost 12,000 new vehicles received this type of protection in the country, contributing to an estimated armored fleet reaching almost 220 thousand units. In 2019, there was an estimated growth of between 20% and 25% compared to the previous year, where premium segment vehicles characterize the majority of civilian armored vehicles. In this context, this paper presents an overview, in the country, of the main models of civilian vehicles that are armored at ballistic protection type III-A level against handguns, according to the NIJ 0108.01 standard, from the National Institute of Justice of the United States. In this sense, just as automakers adopt DFM and DFA, Design for Manufacturing and Design for Assembly, as part of their vehicle developments, the purpose of this paper is to present and propose the addition of DFAr, Design for Armoring in premium vehicle projects.