How China’s car firms are forcing faster development times
HOW DO YOU speed up the development of new cars? The need to come out with relevant products faster has become much more acute as battery technology evolves ever faster and China in particular forces the pace of development.
The penalty for getting it wrong has never been harsher, particularly in the EV and software-defined era.
“The product life cycle of vehicles is so long that by the time you’ve launched a new vehicle, the technology can be very old,” said Neil Endley, global director for turnaround services at quality consultants Trigo.
The speed at which the Chinese are replacing vehicles in particular is worrying traditional car makers. Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida voiced that fear recently, referencing the pace of China’s brands. “They do have the speed to market, which we need to learn in the future,” he said. “Do we do that as a Japanese enterprise? We do lots of testing and experimenting before we hit the road.”
People who have experienced China’s unique turn of development speed say it’s both illuminating and cautionary. “The pace is so fast, things can get done very quickly and they don’t get stuck in the corporate process,” said one executive with experience of leading a global brand in China, on condition of anonymity. He referenced a fairly big change needed for one of the brand’s models to keep pace with the competition.
“The Western engineers said 24 months. The Chinese engineers believed they could do it in six months,” he said. The solution involved so-called dual-path testing: testing different elements in parallel rather than sequentially. “It showed me they were much more nimble and able to respond,” he said. “It’s partly energy and drive, partly just naivety [that] something’s going to work but won’t.”
One way brands have accelerated the process of designing and building a car over the years is increased use of simulation, particularly in the areas of crash testing, aerodynamics and fuel economy. Chinese company Jidu, a collaboration between tech firm Baidu and car giant Geely, is promising to decouple the software development from the hardware for its autonomous car promised for 2023.
Of course, what the customer considers up-to-date in a new car could be restricted to what they
see on the screens, and the software development can be delivered via over-the-air updates.
In announcing its recent tie-up with chip supplier Qualcomm, Renault reckoned that not only could it cut a year off the development time of on-board software, but it could also build new services in the cloud and deliver them in three to six months compared with around three years now.
The new smart chips are key to unlocking this. This way, Renault and others say, even second-hand cars could come with the latest software and features, potentially spelling the end of automatic obsolescence.
However, the danger is that if you skip too many processes, the quality suffers. The development speeds of the consumer electronics industry aren’t repeatable in cars simply because the focus on safety and enduring quality has to be so much tighter. Any gains made by speeding up the process could be thrown away with expensive recalls. As Endley said: “You don’t want to be testing cars with the driver.”