According to a study by the Oliver Wyman consultancy group published in yesterday’s Die Welt newspaper, Car Innovation 2015, nearly 300,000 R&D engineering jobs will be created across the global automotive industry over the next eight years, bringing the total of such jobs to 1.1m, from the 813,000 in 2005.
Most of the new jobs will be with automotive suppliers, to whom assemblers are conferring more and more R&D responsibility, and the jobs will be concentrated in China, India, Eastern Europe and South Korea.
The Oliver Wyman study recommends suppliers to consider the scope and division of research and development investment with care, however, suggesting that automotive innovations too often fail to meet the demands of customers. Many innovations are considered superfluous, with for example just one in six OEMs opting for a given new system.
Oliver Wyman president Jan Dannenberg suggests that as much as 40% of the €800m likely to be invested in automotive R&D between now and 2015 will be ‘thrown out of the window”.
Harbour Consulting is quoted by Die Welt as agreeing that some innovations seem to have been created for the pleasure of the engineers developing them, rather than as solutions to customers’ needs. Motorists are said to be focusing on reduced fuel consumption and purchase prices, while manufacturers and suppliers are more focused on comfort, safety and power.
Only 10% of the 315 innovations expected to be launched over the next eight years are thought likely to sell well, and these are in the fields of reducing consumption, driver assistance and lightweight structures.
|
