Perceived Quality of Cars. A Novel Framework and Evaluation Methodology

Sammanfattning: The supremacy of the automotive manufacturers today is no longer driven by them achieving a superior manufacturing quality but increasingly depends on the customer’s quality perception. Average car consumers see a car’s quality as a fancy mixture of design, aesthetics, their own previous experiences and performance characteristics of the vehicle, unlike a combination of mechanical parts, software pieces, advanced materials, cutting-edge manufacturing processes, with technical knowledge, skills and high production volumes – all ingredients involved in the modern car creation. Perceived quality is one of the most critical aspects for product development that defines successful car design. Speaking of perceived quality, we are dealing with a complex, multifaceted adaptive system; a system where a human is the main agent. “Which product characteristics require the most attention for successful car design?”  This is the question engineers and designers need to answer under the pressure of shrinking product development time, available technologies, and financial limitations, not to mention that the answer is expected to be given in numbers to sustain the fierce competition in today’s automotive industry. For this reason, the perceived quality must be understood and controlled during all stages of product development. The research presented in this thesis justifies the engineering viewpoint on perceived quality as an inevitable part of new product development. The core of this research is the Perceived Quality Framework (PQF), a taxonomy structure of perceived quality attributes and the Perceived Quality Attributes Importance Ranking (PQAIR) method, a novel method for perceived quality evaluation that can be applied to a variety of products, including cars. The PQF communicates the attribute-centric engineering viewpoint on quality perception, developed through cumulative studies in the premium and luxury market segment of the automotive industry. The PQAIR method equips engineers with practical tools for perceived quality evaluation. The proposed method helps to reach the equilibrium of the product’s quality equation from the perspective of design effort, time, and costs estimations. Altogether this introduces a new paradigm of perceived quality as the inevitable element integrated into the process of engineering endeavor regarding product attributes that communicates quality to the customer.