The vehicle has continued to evolve to meet consumer, industry and world needs. Every 30 years, a change is inevitable, said Charles Morgan, director of design with Morgan Motor Co.

At Morgan, it’s about the vehicle and the consumer, pride in the creation and building of each vehicle, which, he noted, takes about 16 hours and is completely built by hand, no robots, no artificial means of compilation.

“I think it’s important to be open about what you do,” Morgan said. “I think it’s important for people to want to visit the factory and know that real people build the cars…new technology is great and we all need it, but there is an element of craftsmanship at Morgan that is important.” That being said, the company recognizes the need to keep up with energy efficiencies and listen to their customers. In an effort to reduce its environmental footprint, Morgan cars are about 30% lighter than those that are mass produced, he noted.

Morgan was one of three members of the production and supply chain innovation session starting this morning’s second day of the Altermobile Europe 2008 conference in Munich.

Phil Barker, chief engineer of hybrid and electric vehicle technologies with Lotus Engineering, discussed four key themes within the topic of production and supply chain innovation — developing new business models, innovation and design as a core business process, collaboration and cooperation, and internationalizing supply and production.

“The basic problem we are looking at is trying to run a country without oil,” said Amit Yudan, Europe Business Development with Better Place. One of the conference themes was to reduce, if not nullify, dependence on oil and conventional fuels and think more out of the box.

“The real market response is volatile,” said Andre Metzner with Roland Berger Strategy during his portion of the presentation, Cooperative Constellations in the New Auto Innovation Game. “No doubt there is a need to cooperate.”

Metzner discussed a variety of “cooperation,” noting most people are familiar with the “marriage” concept, which is planned for the longer time horizon, is formalized and usually has a low flexibility. He also noted a few other important types: club, syndicate, commune, party, forum and expedition.

“These types are not legal/business categories — they can serve more as conceptual reference points for designing or understanding cooperative constellations,” Metzner said in his presentation white paper. “From my experience, cooperative projects need both, a conceptual foundation and cooperative cultural embedding. The culture part should not be underestimated, especially in situations where fierce competitors cooperate or new ground needs to be (jointly) explored.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under Management, Out and About, Sustainabililty, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.