Cars made to measure
EU project sets out to help revitalise the car industry with an initiative to build a vehicle to order in less than a week. Siobhan Wagner reports.
Manufacturing cars quickly to order could save the European car industry billions and safeguard production, according to an EU project team.
The 'five-day car' initiative is exploring how the industry, founded on the principle of mass production, can move towards meeting customer needs better by building a car to order in less than a week.
Called
(ILIPT) the EU-funded project comprises 27 partners such as Daimler, BMW, Siemens and SMEs and Bath and Cambridge universities, and will publish its findings in June.
'The automotive industry is already moving towards this and we could see cars built this way by 2015,' said one of the project leaders, Glenn Parry of
.
His research team believes that eventually customers will walk into a car dealer on a Monday, place an order for a car, and take delivery of the model with all of their specifications by Friday.
Rather than following the traditional practice of manufacturing the body of the car in a single steel shell, ILIPT is examining how to build it from a number of standard, pre-formed modules. The body frame is subdivided into four main modular pieces: front end, engine bay, front greenhouse and rear greenhouse.
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