Research Article

Automotive manufacturing technologies – an international viewpoint

¹ Institute of Production Science (wbk), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Kaiserstrasse 12, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany
² Wu Manufacturing Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
³ School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, P.R. China
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20156 Milan, Italy

^* e-mail: steven.peters@kit.edu

Received: 15 June 2014
Accepted: 28 July 2014

Abstract

The automotive industry can be described as a backbone in many developed countries such as Japan, Korea, USA, and Germany, while being an enabler for economic prosperity in developing countries like China, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and Russia at the same time. However, the dynamics and uncertainty are increasing heavily by market changes, regulations, customer behavior, and new product technologies. Manufacturing research has to find answers to increase quality of products, flexibility of plants, and supply chain networks, to manage complexity in technologies and variants and overall to stay competitive even in high wage countries. In this paper, major technological challenges are discussed and the current state of manufacturing technology and research is presented. Moreover, for each technological and organizational area, future industrial, and research challenges are highlighted.