Another video interview by Lauri Põldre, GrabCAD’s Sales Director, from the Hannover Messe ’11. This time he asked couple of questions from Volkswagen’s Head of Research Group, Prof. Dr. Werner Schreiber. They talked about the principles of innovation in Volkswagen, engineering trends and car design.
Lauri Põldre: This is GrabCAD at Hannover Messe 2011, today I’m talking to Mr. Wener Schreiber from Volkswagen, Head of Group Research. Mr. Schreiber, what is your today’s innovation at Hannover Messe?
Werner Schreiber: Today’s innovation is not only one, but two. One one side we show here our entire idea of an energy efficient production process, on the other hand we show a compact car which is a new small Bulli, which is a concept car, electrically driven which we’ll present to the German public today here.
Lauri Põldre: What are the engineering trends in Volkswagen?
Werner Schreiber: Let’s start with the engineering trends in production. In production it’s going in the direction of energy efficiency. We have to have a sustainable production process. That means we need to go into each detail of the entire production process to see whether energy efficiency is a question there.
We can start, for example, thinking about light-weight structures within production. We have light-weight design in the cars, there’s a trend within the cars, and we have to take this trend and put it into production ideas as well.
On the other hand - energy efficiency within production needs many, many small steps like we have in the Kaizen process - many small steps that help us create an energy efficient production system. It starts with the building isolation and ends up that we change from air power tools to electronic tools where the power that we need for these tools is produced by solar modules that were mounted on the rooftop of the building.
Volkswagen Bulli concept car. Click for larger version.
Lauri Põldre: Who decides what the car will look like?
Werner Schreiber: How the car will look like is a process with many steps. We start that we ask the customer - we show the customer ideas and we see their response. We present all of the world concept cars and we see how customers react to this car. Do they like it? Do they dislike it? How do they argue? Do they have a smile on their face when they leave our booth? And this is one basic starting point for our design process.
And then we start to think in classical way about the marketing, do we think there’s a market for this car, is the pricing correct, all these standard procedures which we have. And in the end a decision is made whether such a car is going into series production.
Lauri Põldre: Thank you very much for this interview, Mr.Schreiber.
Read more about Volkswagen’s "Think Blue. Factory." sustainable production concept.
