Collection and analysis of reliability data over the whole product lifetime of vehicles

One of the biggest challenges in quantitative reliability analyses is a complete and significant data basis, which describes the complete product lifetime. Today, this data basis, in regards to the demanded and needed information, is not given. Especially the circumstances, that lead to a failure while the field usage, e.g. operational and ambient information before and while failure occurrence, are of highest importance. In the development phase of products much more detailed data is collected and documented, compared to the amount in general customer field usage. Today, one of the most important data basis to describe the real field behavior are warrantee and goodwill data. For an optimal correlation between failures that occur while testing and while field usage, these data are not sufficient. In order to improve this situation, an approach was developed, with which the collection of reliability relevant data during costumer usage is enabled over the whole product lifetime of vehicles. The basis of this reliability orientated data collection is the consideration of already available CAN signals in modem vehicles.