Today automotive manufacturers are facing a crisis with increased pressure to strengthen their brands. To prevent declining results many automakers have chosen to extend its brand to other industries i.e. various forms of brand extensions. Automotive manufacturers have developed an international strategy for what merchandise to offer. The strategy has received an overall positive response, however, it does not apply well within the Swedish market where merchandise is sold in less quantity than abroad.

The Swedish Automotive industry has since way back been struggling with bankruptcy, abroad buy outs and staff cuts. Competition and pressure on prices are two factors that affect the Automotive industry. Because of this, the companies are pressured to continuously developing their work in addition to be able to compete on the market. The aircraft industry has successfully managed to implement additive manufacturing (AM) and for motorsport has several components manufactured with AM been used. When AM is used as a manufacturing method, there are a number of advantagesthat follows.

Problem: The relations between first and second tier suppliers within the Automotive industry have changed drastically during recent years. Previously involving the supply of simple components, today the relation involves collaborative product development of complex subsystems. The situation is rather new for the actors, hence there are a number of problems that act as restraints for the collaboration. In order to come to terms with these problems, it is important to determine the underlying causes. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to make a survey of the main problems in the collaborative product development between first and second tier suppliers within the Swedish Automotive industry.

Framtagning av en ny infästningen mellan damasken och växelspaken till företaget Kongsberg Automotive AB..

The report assesses the typical questions regarding Corporate Social Responsibility within the Automotive industry. An attempt as to whether Corporate Social Responsibility has an impact on growth companies is demonstrated. Volkswagen Group is within the required analytical criteria, which are to be studied. Also, the fact that they recently launched ?Strategy 2018? makes it even more interesting to immerse into.

This report looks at the possibility of designing a universal adapter for Flat Blade windshield wipers in cooperation with European Automotive Supplier AB.To understand and see if this is possible, a research and an extensive patent search where done. Then to add structure to the project a Ganttschematic were developed. To generate good and solid ideas, different methods for product development were looked upon.When a method was chosen and applied, a series of concepts emerged. Now the focus was to design and construct all the pieces. The desired manufacture procedures were looked upon as well as materials.

An increasing number of automotive supplier companies are investing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in order to gain cost advantages. This has happened in a rapid pace since many of these countries did not have any foreign direct investments (FDI) at the turn of the century. The problem now is for how long these countries will be able to maintain the low costs. One purpose was to create a model of country advantages for automotive supplier companies when relocating further production to CEE. This dissertation was written in cooperation with the Trelleborg Group.

Purpose: The purpose of the investigation is to give an insight to hot the EU legal environment in the field of vertical relationships influences the competitiveness of the 2nd tier of the automobile industry. Conclusion:It follows that European legislation has succeedded in raising the competitiveness by breaking down the powers of the predominantly more powerful companies that the 2nd tier players do business with and by giving companies sufficient leeway to act. The comment must be made here that serious problems due to a power misbalance might still exist yet are not uncovered. In the course of my research I have found a lack of issues in my subject field. These problems however would have a more structural and economical cause, dealing with these problems would fall outside the boundaries of the competence of European competition legislation.

As a result of global competition, companies within the Automotive industry are required to improve their production systems to achieve sustainable and competitive production. To attain operational excellence, companies have adopted concepts like lean and World Class Manufacturing (WCM).In order to deliver, companies need to increase the availability and reliability of production equipment. This demands focus on both operational and strategic maintenance, and efficient equipment acquisition and management. The main objective of this thesis is to identify processes and success factors that are necessary for improved maintenance performance. By conducting a case study and by performing a literature review, the following has been studied: 1) how companies within the Automotive industry work with maintenance and maintenance strategies, 2) implementation of maintenance strategies, and 3) new acquisition and spare parts management for maintenance. The results show that basic maintenance concepts and related terms are well defined in the literature.

The Automotive industry is today in a world of globalisation and external factors can influence the car companies and it is important that they progress with the people. When an external factor, as the oil price, increases dramatically, it will affect the economies in different matters. Other external factors are impacted by the oil price, for example inflation, unemployment and target rates. In addition, people are changing their preferences due to the attention of the environment. With this as the foundation the problem of the essay were divided into three aspects.

Constantly growing demands from the costumers in the Automotive industry forces the subcontractors to seek alternative ways to compete. One parameter of quality is the components tolerance against NVH(Noise, Vibraion & Harshness) aspects. Kongsbergs Automotive has developed a new gear shifter platform (Shift-by-Wire) that is sold to Alfa Romeo and used in of their car models. However, the company is not pleased with the components sound quality, therefore the main purpose of this thesis is to develope a number of concepts that is supposed to enhance these NVH-aspects.To get an understanding of the problem an analysis of the causes of the emitted sound has been done parallell to a product decomposition, function decomposition and a Ishikawa-diagram. Together with these methods has a litterature study been performed to get familiar with the physics of an impact and especially the emittment of noise.

This report is part of the major thesis carried out at Stoneridge Electronics in Bromma,Stockholm during autumn and winter 2005-2006. The background to the thesis is the trendwithin the Automotive industry where color displays have become more common for presentationof information to the driver, a trend that has come to the commercial vehicle market. Thepurpose of the thesis has been to evaluate whether programmable logic, with respect to FPGAtechnology, could be suitable for display control and graphics generation of these more complexcolor displays in automotive environment.Within the scope of the thesis the FPGA technology has been investigated, i.e. whatopportunities and threats there are with aspect to environmental and security requirements. Inaddition, the market of FPGAs and pre-built IP-cores has been investigated.

The disconnect between assumptions regarding computer users interactions made by software engineers and the actual interactions do, for various reasons, not always match. Gathering actual usage data from user interfaces can enable software designers to make better educated decisions. By buildning a prototype for collecting such data from a diagnosis tool for the Automotive industry this project has shown not only how to benefit from the data but also how to perform the work. The data is 1 600 sessions consisting of 26 000 individual events. From this it has shown that available tools can assist in rudimentary questions regarding usage.

The Automotive industry is increasingly studying lightweight solution in their designs, also rational production and low costs in materials and manufacturing methods are of great interest. This thesis consisted in the practical evaluation of anchors for sandwich panels. The object was to study loads of shearing and pull out of the plane. The experiments were carried out on panels made up of 1mm aluminium coatings and 50mm extruded polystyrene (XPS) at its core. As the fasteners used simple methods such as blind rivets, screw and glue.

The use of subscription services directed towards customers has become a common phenomenon in a vast number of different industries. We have noticed a clear trend of new businesses emerging solely offering subscriptions, and existing companies altering sales of their products to become parts of subscriptions. But research has not caught up with this trend yet, especially regarding why it occurs and how it affects existing businesses internally. The purpose of this study is to examine the driving forces for change and examine how existing businesses have to change parts of their business models to offer subscription services. The premise of this study has been Vargo & Luschs (2004) Service Dominant Logic with their foundational premises and Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder et.