When it comes to niche products, Group Lotus, which comprises Lotus Engineering and Lotus Cars, rules supreme. It has made a living for decades out of designing, engineering and producing bespoke products that virtually all other carmakers would find prohibitively expensive. Versatile Vehicle Architecture (VVA) is a new look at how to build, design and manufacture niche models in volumes of around 10,000 to 15,000 units and still make a profit. Lotus created a fairly simplistic model where they chose three inputs within realms that typical manufacturers would want to spend on a niche product. There are three key ingredients: the amount you spend up front; the amount you invest; and how much it costs to produce - the bill of materials and assembly costs and so on, and the overheads of running the offices. Lotus ended up with a series of curves and what areas were affected by what input, and when they were up to producing 10,000 to 15,000 units per annum it was dominated by the unit cost unless a stupid amount of money had been spent on developing it. If under 5,000 units are being sold a year, then the most dominant factor is the investment, typically where Lotus is sitting, but there's a whole realm between what Lotus does and others are looking at with regard to low volume niches, which meant that they needed to find solutions. The idea of VVA is to sit in the middle, not be as bespoke or special as these or as low volume. Lotus wanted to come up with a concept that worked at slightly higher volumes and would bring some of the benefits of the reduced costs of producing it at higher volume, but it had to have the advantages of the lower volume in terms of being special and being able to offer different characters.
Answering the need
Automotive Engineer ; 29 , 6 ; 32-35
2004
3 Seiten, 6 Bilder
Article (Journal)
English
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