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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

It’s not cheap, it’s low cost. No, it’s cheap.

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At today’s Automotive Electronics Congress in Paris: an interesting insight into the emerging low-cost car market: this is the objective of building cars that will sell for up to €5000, or maybe €7000, depending who you listen to, primarily for what appears to be generally known as the BRIC market (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Target selling prices go as low (would you believe?) as a figure under €2000 set as an objective by Tata of India. Established names aiming to make an entry in this space include Renault,Toyota, VW and Fiat, using approaches that involve manufacture in very high volumes, of very basic vehicles, and (great word) ‘decontenting’. Decontenting is not another way saying they are going to make people unhappy, it means taking features and functions that have become standard on cars in the more developed markets and making them (at best) options, or simply not offering them – ABS, air conditioning, and so on.
The presentation at the conference was given by Nick Ford of Frost and Sullivan; developing his theme of how the industry will get the costs out of these designs, he reports the intention by one supplier of offering a modular body-control-electronics platform that can incorporate controls for various disparate systems, thus cutting cost by using the same hardware across different models and manufacturers.
I’m (almost) lost for words. I could take a look at how long ago I can recall automotive OEM suppliers first talking of standardised ECUs that could be used in multiple applications – but I’m not going to because I don’t even want to know how long that was. Let’s just say, quite a few years. Where did it all go wrong? How did we get to today’s situation of ECUs that are unique to manufacturer, to individual model and even then have multiple variants? Why has it taken the advent of the mega-cheap car to force the industry to face up to this problem?
Part of the problem has been the proliferation of software, to which I alluded a few days ago, and of which, more later.

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