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Automobile Design: How long does it take to develop a car design from scratch?

  • How long does it take a major car company (like VW, Toyota, or Ford) to design, test, and manufacture a new car?  Do some companies do it faster than others?  What are the different stages of designing, testing, and preparing a new car design to be manufactured?  How long do these stages last?

  • Answer:

    Quick answer: 3 years. Each OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has its own schedule.  Historically American OEMs would focus more on shrinking the time and would try to get it in 24 months.  In doing so, they would have to focus more on prototypes to ensure things go together well.  The joke at GM (I didn't work there, friends did) and they told me was that somebody would screw something up and you didn't want to be the first one to delay the build. Short term focus on product development would lead to issues like this.  Other firms would focus on getting the kinks out on paper/cad and would minimize the prototype builds.  This has worked well if you plan correctly. So the basic timeline is like this: 0-4 months rough planning.  Product planning/ marketing/ engineering go over the big picture (SUV to target a customer profile of x). 2-6 months rough prototype build on a mule. these are the prototypes you don't see on the road. Back & forth w/ different groups to get the rough idea down.  6-12 months - One maybe two phases of builds have gone through and the design has been refined.  A lot of work has been done in cad/cae and it has to be verified for govt. regulations. 12-24 months design has been more or less finalized. Prototypes are built which you see in magazines/japlonik type blogs.  18-30 months tooling has been designed, the factory has been working on retrofitting,etc. 30-36 depending on how the past 30 months have gone, feedback from auto shows, etc. this can be a trying time as you are under the gun to get the product as good as possible before launch.  if you took short cuts early on in development then you will be under the gun now. most of this information is available in trade magazines like SAE and http://autonews.com if you want more information.

Faheem Gill at Quora Visit the source

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The standard time for most companies from the drawing board to commercialization  usually used to be 4 years for most companies. But like everyone has mentioned with new state of the art technology and better management, some companies have brought it down to 2 years. It starts with designers sketching out basic concepts. Parallelogram engineers start developing and designing what they think is gonna go in. After a few months, clay models are made and packaging issues of the engineering parts are looked at more closely. 8-9 months (or more for some)  down, the design is set in stone and prototyping begins. Then the whole cycle of testing, iterating and correcting starts. Around 6 months in, the concept is released after which, based on feedback the whole cycle starts again. And at the end of it (assuming a  2 year period, is released on he market). So in a 2 year schedule, 7-8 months are for design. 7-8 for prototyping and correction. And the rest for setting up the plant and finalizing the production model. These times vary depending on the company Hope that helped.

Sheetanshu Tyagi

It is not same in all car manufacturers. Usually almost all cars manufactured by having previously designed chasis and power train, only body will change. It may take around 2 to 3 years to complete.If everything is new, then it may take 3 to 5 years, It varies company to company. Some projects took 10 years also for some companies.

Basu Raj

All the answers so far I can only agree with.  Just to add more color: all the answers assume that the powertrain is "off the shelf:" that is, we are only developing a new MODEL, not a new ENGINE + MODEL.  That would add more years to the process.  Also, speed to some extent depends on whether the model is built on an existing PLATFORM or not.  A new model on a new platform (new fundamental underlying structure) will take much longer than a new model on an existing platform.

Glenn Mercer

Jose Berengueres

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