Abstract
Keywords- vehicle concept, fuel consumption, customer demands, driving resistance, CO2-reduction
Resources of fossil fuels are limited. With growing vehicle numbers it will be strictly necessary to reduce the fuel consumption of each car in order to reduce or at least level the total fuel consumption over all cars.
On the other hand customers have been used to the fact that fuel consumption and price are proportional (larger cars - more consumption - higher price). This relationship is continued by the customer with products getting smaller, he concludes that a less consuming car will have a lower price.
For reducing the fuel consumption dramatically compared to today's cars, it will be necessary to use measures like light weight construction, automated gearboxes, stop-start-systems etc. This will afflict in higher prices without diminishing customer demands. If these measures are not sufficient, customer demands have to be discussed and even probably be reduced.
It is shown, that there has always been the attempt to disintegrate the apparent contradictions between fuel consumption and CO2-reduction on the one hand and customer demands on the other, and that this could be achieved under the given constraints. Even with higher technical efforts the advances in reducing fuel consumption are leading to physical boundaries. To overcome these boundaries, it is necessary to use measures that may afflict customer demands (such as higher price or reducing advantages in customer values).
By means of different vehicle concepts (for example Blue Motion concept, Lupo 3L, 1-litre-car) it will be shown, how such measures could look like and which effects on the customer demands will result from this. In the end considerable reductions in fuel consumption compared to today will only be realized by the interaction of elaborate technical measures, specific operating conditions and adapted customer demands.
This lecture is to give a perspective to possible approaches and alternatives for a solution, and it will show that apparently oppositional requirements can be contemplated and solved only in a holistic manner.