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Is It OK To Be Human?

Automotive manufacturing once led the industry tobuild products of the highest quality at consumer-level competitive pricing. With the quantity and complexity of electronics increasing almost exponentially in automotive manufacturing, market quality issues, including recalls, continue apace, while the demand grows for a more modern manufacturing delivery profile that reflects the changing needs of the customer. After being stagnant for many years and adopting production principles based on process qualification and repeatability, can automotive find a new way forward, with quality assurance and cost competitiveness, but also with flexibility, which is most critical now? Is it the risk of human error that has prevented the industry from moving forward toward highly reactive processes, such as those mandated by Industry 4.0?

The Opportunity for Automotive

The automobile continues to enjoy a special position in the consumer market. For many people, a car is a necessity and represents a major part of their personal expenditure. This can easily be justified because a significant part of many people’s lives are spent in the car, and this is the time when they are on view to the widest audience in society. The car has become a social vehicle, driven by fashion and personal desires, as well as by performance and costs. Car makers have provided buyers with many choices of models with a huge amount of variants and options. Buyers can effectively have the automaker build something that matches their precise wants and needs, and yet is affordable. For many high-end models, it can be rare to find any two cars with the exact same specification. For the factories, this means that every car made is, to a significant extent, built to order.

Technology has developed in a favourable way for the automotive industry. Driver focus is enhanced by systems that now automate things that the driver once had to control manually: The timing of wipers, the number of indications that are made, maintaining the cabin temperature, turning lights on and off, etc. Unseen logic now also manages almost every aspect of the engine operation and stability of the vehicle, controlling power delivery, suspension, and brakes. Light bulbs are monitored electronically to ensure that they will work when needed. Sophisticated navigation and communication systems are available on most cars, with a huge range of choice of entertainment systems. More recently, cameras and other sensors continuously scan around the car, providing features such as lane deviation alert, automated braking to avoid collision, and even features to allow cars to park themselves.

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Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of SMT Magazine.