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The creation of products incorporating “customer delight” features, excellent aesthetics, fit and finish quality, and styling differentiators remains an over-riding priority within the automotive industry. The rapid advancements in computer-aided technologies now enable diverse functions such as styling, engineering and manufacturing to work concurrently early on in the product development cycle, with shared understanding of customer expectations for fit and finish quality. This paper discusses recent developments at Rover Group concerning methodology and deployment of Virtual Reality techniques early in the process to aid the development of new models with significantly greater level of confidence in the manufacturing outcomes. Examples includes simulation and visualisation of surface quality defects normally found on metal and plastic parts and visualisation of quality standard.

Customer preference for the “eye catching” and aesthetically good looking product has made the car quality a key competitive issue. Manufacturers have no choice but to design and manufacture products to exceptional levels of quality while remaining cost competitive. If excessive costs of “quality” are to be avoided, product and process design standards must be harmonised to ensure that product quality can be designed in from the start of a new product development cycle. However, the subjective nature of the car body aesthetic quality makes it difficult to ensure effective communication across different functions of the organization. Traditionally, product engineers are more used to designing for product performance targets such as stiffness, dentability and weight, while process engineers are primarily concerned with ensuring manufacturing feasibility within an agreed cost target.