Competitive Landscape - Strategic Passenger Vehicles Architectures Benchmark

The topic examined in the present work has been developed in the Electrified Vehicles Product Planning department in Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and deals with passenger vehicles architectures. The aim of this work is to provide a benchmark about the future strategies on vehicle architectures adopted by passenger cars manufacturers in the future challenging context due to more stringent carbon dioxide emissions reduction targets in 2025 and 2030 imposed by the European Union. The investigated timeframe extends up to 2024 in order to identify how car manufacturers will arrange to face the radical transformation in the European automotive market from 2025. The work methodology has started from searching data and information about the car manufacturers architectures portfolio to evaluate past, present and future trends. The collected data and information have been validated by looking on car makers press releases and investors relationships. Afterwards, a detailed analysis about electrification technologies and vehicle architectures employed by each model has been performed. Consequently, the electrification technologies adopted by each vehicle platform have been obtained. After that, the vehicle architectures have been clustered per typology: conventional platform, designed for internal combustion engines, modified conventional platform, designed for internal combustion engines and afterwards modified for electrified vehicles, multi-energy platform, flexibly designed for both internal combustion engine and electrified vehicles, and dedicated battery electric vehicle platform, designed from scratch just for battery electric vehicles. Then, an analysis by segments has been accomplished in order to recognize possible tendency in vehicle architectures cluster adoption in certain segments. Eventually, an analysis about volumes on each vehicle architecture has been performed in order to determine possible economies of scale bearing the investment for the development of a dedicated battery electric vehicle platform. The key findings that have emerged from the present work are mainly three. Firstly, the modified conventional platforms are just transient and related to an adaptation period before dedicated battery electric vehicle or multi-energy platforms adoption. Secondly, multi-energy platform will be adopted by majority of car manufacturers. Thirdly, dedicated battery electric vehicle platforms will be present on larger and premium segments and in high sales volumes segments.