Strategic challenges in developing electric vehicles: a literature review

Within the next ten years, radical innovation in electric vehicles (EVs) will cause profound changes in the way automakers develop their products. The prevailing lean product development approach (LPDA), based on concurrent engineering (CE), may well be modified substantially to fit with EV's high technology content, high innovation rate and high uncertainty context. In addition, the fact that a large part of EV's technologies must come from outside the auto industry is another challenge in itself. Our literature review leads us to conclude, first, that strategy formulation should be driven by the emergence of a dominant design. Second, we find that organizational change efforts will have to be focused more directly upon the management of knowledge. Third, we finally argue that capabilities development will occur only if a number of adjustments are made to the LPDA, especially regarding suppliers, leaders, people and tools.