The Kit Hit: Hackenberg Joins Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan And Taiichi Ohno
Hackenberg and Winterkorn
TTAC has been following Volkswagen’s new building block architecture for years. Now, it finally begins to sink in what it means. Suddenly, there are media reports more effusive than we ever dared. An article by Reuters compares Ulrich Hackenberg, Volkswagen’s father of the Modularer Querbaukasten MQB, with “the likes of Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan and Taiichi Ohno in the canon of auto industry pioneers.” The architecture, says Reuters “is helping power the German company to the top of the global sales charts several years ahead of its 2018 target. It could also make VW one of the most profitable carmakers in the world.”
Like so often in the business, the idea was a tough sell. Hackenberg nurtured his idea for three decades, “early pitches to auto executives were largely ignored.” Finally, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn bought it, must likely with Ferdinand Piech strongly recommending that he should.
Volkswagen basically dumped platforms, and developed a lego kit from which cars are designed and made, along with fundamental changes in production engineering.
According to the article, previously dismissive companies such as Toyota and Ford already are “benchmarking” the architecture. “We’d be crazy not to,” a senior Ford official told Reuters.
The MQB kit will cost Volkswagen nearly $70 billion, but it also promises annual gross savings by 2019 of $19 billion, Morgan Stanley calculated. It could bring Volkswagen’s gross margins to 10 percent.
The first large-scale and very successful roll-out of the MQB architecture was the new Golf. Soon, all of Volkswagen Group’s small and medium front-wheel-drive family models, and hence the bulk of Volkswagen AG’s output, will have MQB as their base.
Far behind in the game is the world’s second largest automaker GM. Two years ago, GM announced plans to slim down its obese portfolio of platforms, shrinking he number of “Core Architectures” to 24, which will serve 62 percent of GM’s output. By comparison, more than 60 percent of Volkswagen Group’s output will be served by MQB alone. By 2018, GM wanted to shrink the number of global architectures to 14, serving 90 percent of the volume. By the end of the decade, GM will still use a mess of platforms, while Volkswagen will have long retired platforms altogether. Most carmakers find themselves 10 years behind Volkswagen.
Volkswagen engineers are already working on the next level of integration:
Larger cars with longitudinal engines are underpinned by a Modularer Längsbaukasten. Then there is the NSF (New Small Family) kit for tiny cars, and the Modularer Standardantriebsbaukasten (MSB), designed for premium rear- and all-wheel-drive vehicles such as the Porsche 911, the Bentley Continental and the Lamborghini Gallardo. That large number of kits bugs Hackenberg, and he already thinks about the mother of all kits.
Now you know why leading Volkswagen engineers all have white hair.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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I would guess this allows for more standardized manufacturing among their model variations. Different models can go down the the assembly line with minimal change-over time - where fixtures are reused for most and maybe just a robotic program change for assembly location variables. Adapting assembly equipment to a different location isn't as big a deal if it's not very far and the parts are standardized. As mentioned by others here, other companies are already doing it in some form as well - but they don't have a fancy name. The potential savings (and quality improvements) using minimally variable manufacturing and part standardization can't be ignored. One interesting thing about platform development like this (and others) is lower end models get chassis dynamics similar to the higher end variations. It's also very good from a maintenance standpoint to have similar and inexpensive/standardized parts. The challenge for designers will be how to differentiate models with fewer variables.
I don't mean to harp, but MQB really is NOT a platform in the traditional sense. A typical manufacturer's platform would essentially be a chassis with a fixed wheelbase that would let you change the sheet metal and interior (the "hat"). The result is things like the oddly proportioned Cadillac XTS which has too many fixed points to deal with. MQB is a building block, lego-esque kit that allows for everything to be variable with the exception of the front axle to the pedal box. Otherwise the width, wheelbase, track, front and rear overhangs, etc., can all be variable. That will allow them to build a Passat that has Passat-like proportions while still sharing extensive commonality with a Golf, instead of looking like a stretched Golf, or a Golf looking like a shrunken Passat. When it comes to assembly techniques, I need to locate it, but Volkswagen published a fascinating PowerPoint a few months ago that described the simplication there. Case in point was the design of a mounting bracket for the dashboard: in the past the Golf, Tiguan, various Skodas, Audis and Seats all had unique mounting brackets and mounting methods for the dashboard. Under MQB they've consolidated that down to just one mounting bracket and one mounting method. As a result, A new MQB A3 has a very unique dash compared to the new MQB Golf, but they're assembled using the same technique and the same sub-components. For power trains, VW and Audi have standardized their transverse engines to all angle the same way (~15 degrees back) and mount the same way. In the past the 2.0TFSI, 3.2VR6, 2.5, 1.8, 1.4, 1.2, 2.0TDI, all had unique mounting positions in the engine bay and unique orientations. The gasoline models mounted differently from the diesels and each was packaged somewhat uniquely. Now, all of the engines will mount the same with near-identical packaging and placement.