Changing the speed of change
Time has pretty much compressed in the automotive world. Car companies operate more quickly, they make changes more quickly, they deliver more quickly. The joke that isn’t really a joke now is often that when a buyer talks about needing something fast, they are thrown the question, “Do you want industry fast, or do you want China fast?”
It is no question true that the business model that is used by Chinese companies now operates much more quickly, but that quickness comes from a lot of different things. It comes from serious dedication to what they’re doing. It comes from an almost society-wide vision of moving forward. It comes from having urban planning that puts different producers together in space and time. It puts logistical systems in that make everything easier. And all this is supported by a government that will be both exacting and supportive.
In speaking with European and European-trained industrial designers working in China on different industries, what they like is the fact that everything gets done so quickly. They can make a design or come up with an idea. They can walk across the hall or the road and have it prototyped and tested, and feedback will come, and they actually see the end result of what they’re working on. So there are a lot of things that are making these new vehicles come out more quickly and develop more rapidly.
Now let’s look at another country, one new to vehicle manufacturing, which is Vietnam. VinFast, the automotive and motorcycle manufacturer, has been around just under 10 years and is expanding quite rapidly and already putting good workable vehicles on the road. They themselves say they have a long way to go into creating what they want to create and improving all the little things that make a car a car. But their vehicles are on the road, and they are developing communities, and they are providing transportation. The VinFast group is part of a very large group and conglomerate that is into a very large diversity of industries.
It’s arguable that the Vietnam model is even faster than the China model, but then the Vietnam model has the ability of quick movement because they don’t have the number of factories that China has. So what do you do when you’re what they now call a legacy car maker, and this efficiency and this speed is just not built into your system anymore?
That’s not a bad thing because cars often had a lot more testing before they came to market. And generations of design and production mean generations of wisdom and understanding what works for a human being and what doesn’t. So yes, there are pros and cons to both, but what do the legacy manufacturers do?
One of the things they do is rework their systems within their own framework. And an example of this is BMW and Plant Munich. We spent a good amount of time early this year in Munich looking at some of the car models that have just come out, and some of them that will still come out, and the system in place in what they call the new Plant Munich, which is basically inside and around Munich itself.
It is a very old facility in many ways, but it has been completely reworked, and it hasn’t just been reworked on the physical side, and this is what BMW was trying to explain to us. They have plants all around the world, and the Munich plant is a very long-standing one, but it is now part of a system where within Plant Munich itself, they happily and proudly said they can produce the rolling prototypes and pre-production running vehicles as well as full production vehicles.
What this means is they are now taking the moves towards increasing efficiency and thereby increasing speed. Additionally, one of the things they talked about was that they basically are producing cars 24 hours a day in the different parts of the world. They explained this by saying that because they have these different factories in different time zones, one of them is always running, even if they are not running multiple shifts. They’re all connected, and the working groups are connected. What they say is sometimes there’s a question for a product or a design or a flow that comes up in Munich, and by the time Munich is back online the next day, it’s been answered by someone in the US or someone in another part of the world. This perhaps is their answer to the fact that Vietnam and VinFast only have one or two facilities, and China has facilities that are fresh and new and able to operate with the benefits of proximity.
Perhaps this is BMW’s answer to keeping their heritage and their vision and their dedication, but adjusting in the proper way for a different future.
Once again, while all this is going on in an industry that is quite challenging, it is also going on and giving consumers more choices and more options. And actually, more of the ability to get something just a bit more tailored to what they want, as opposed to being forced to choose from what someone else says is the best car, period. All this is and definitely will continue to shake up the automotive and mobility markets. And it remains to be seen what the end result will be and whether or not we will like it.
