In today's car industry, companies are focused on higher performance cars with lower cost in order to attract the customer. In other words, the winner of this competitive market is the company which offers a high performance car with lower price and reasonable maintenance cost. For this reason, many companies are trying to identify customer needs and market demands for developing new products based on these desires. For making this happen, using life cycle cost analysis will help the manufacturer in order to find the best way for reducing unnecessary costs and developing new products that fit the market. As an important part of the life cycle cost assessment, the usage of different resources such as raw material and fuel consumption should be evaluated. This will also help the manufacturer to design a car with lower end cost and reasonable maintenance cost. In this project, life cycle cost assessment for an ordinary steel car has been compared with a carbon fiber car. For this reason, a life cycle cost model is designed for encompassing the cost of crucial elements that have major influence on cost. Hence, the pre-manufacturing cost, manufacturing cost, use and post use costs have been evaluated. According to the assessment, the cost of raw material for carbon fiber composites is more than steel. However, the total life cycle cost for a carbon fiber BIW is less than the steel one because of the fact that manufacturing costs as well as use costs are lower for carbon fiber car. Consequently, composite cars could make their way towards the market with the assistance of car industries. According to that, designers and manufacturers should focus on new concepts with this generation of materials in order to achieve and develop new technologies for mass production of composite passenger cars. This assessment might help the car manufacturers in decision making for material replacement in a new generation of passenger cars. According to the life cycle cost analysis, using fiber carbon as the primary material in BIW has reasonable cost so that car industries could accept and develop this kind of material for mass production. However, reviewing the results showed that one problem for mass production of fiber carbon cars is the price of raw material. The cost of manufacturing for steel is higher than fiber carbon so that it could help the car manufacturer to reduce the costs in this part. Moreover, the weight reduction will result in lower fuel consumption for carbon fiber cars without reducing safety, stability, durability, and other performances. If a mass production of 100,000 cars per year is considered, the fuel saving during the life span will be 200,931,000 gallons. Considering the current fuel price of 2.3 US-Dollar/gal, the total saving cost for 100,000 vehicles will be 462,141,300 US-Dollar. Thus, the saved cost might not seem considerable for only one car but it has a wide effect on a larger scale. Despite of what the customer thinks about lower performance, carbon fiber cars are meeting higher standards for safety as well as lower maintenance cost with almost the same performance. Also, different performance factors could be improved even more than before because of the fact that composites can be customized for different uses.
Life cycle cost analysis for passenger cars: steel versus composites
Gesamtkostenanalyse während der Lebensdauer von Personenkraftwagen: Vergleich Stahl gegenüber Verbundwerkstoffen
2009
29 Seiten, 4 Bilder, 8 Tabellen, 22 Quellen
Conference paper
English
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