Quality and Affordability by Design in Vehicle Realization 2024-01-2496

Vehicle quality and affordability will always be the most distinguishing summative characteristics in a fully saturated and highly competitive market. While vehicle quality differentiates between brands in any market segment, affordability remains the key decisive factor for many buyers in each segment. Equally important, affordability is a critical factor in achieving equity in transportation by providing reasonably priced vehicles with quality fitting the needs of different users. Keeping in mind that the cost of quality is usually in conflict with affordability, the main challenge during the different phases of the vehicle design and development process from inception to production becomes the achievement of the multi-objective conflicting goals of maximizing affordability and quality at the same time.

In this paper, guided by quality characteristics framework, that accounts for affordability as a context and structured participation of the customers during the vehicle realization process, the maximization of quality achievements within the preestablished affordability targets throughout the process is studied and discussed. By establishing and monitoring affordability and quality targets by the quality management system along with integrating customers’ participations at critical phases during the realization process from inception to production, the necessary inputs for decision making to deconflict the multi-objective goals of maximizing quality and affordability throughout the product design and development process could be achieved.

To ensure customer satisfaction for quality and stay within targeted affordability, changes to the quality management system and product development process traditional customer participation are proposed. These changes are necessary to integrate affordability as the quality context in the traditional quality management system and include systematic customers’ participation at the end of selected key stages of the vehicle realization. By adding customers’ reviews at critical phases during the realization process, the needed customers’ inputs to achieve the desired vehicle quality within the established tolerances and affordability targets could be achieved.