Enabling our clients to implement ‘right first time’ development for new products

Case study - A Chinese vehicle manufacturer, keen to expand into Europe, was experiencing difficulty in understanding how to meet the high speed crash and pedestrian protection requirements of Euro NCAP without negatively influencing their low speed performance to meet RCAR insurance requirements.

SBD provided assistance and training to help the client’s engineers with model simulation techniques and highlighted alternative design solutions to give them a fuller understanding of how to design effectively for the European market.

SBD also provided expert guidance on a target setting process and how to design for “best in class” insurance ratings by minimising low speed damage. This included calculating the required characteristics of the available crush space for maximum energy absorption, optimising the restraint performance and time to fire and intelligent packaging to avoid component stack-up.

Outcome - A good balance was achieved between the conflicting requirements of RCAR and Euro NCAP and the clients in-house knowledge has increased significantly. Its engineers and product planners are able to understand what they need to do for each market and how to set and achieve targets so that when their vehicles are launched in Europe they will be competitive against other models.