Impact of Electric Mobility on the After Sales Service in the Automotive Industry

The automotive market is currently subject to an unprecedented change. Presently a transformation from the conventional, individual kind of mobility, which was primarily operated by internal combustion engines, to a change of technology, driven by sustainable drive systems such as electric mobility, takes place. By now it is quite ambiguous, which technology within the individual mobility will have great success. However there is a general agreement, that the change of mobility will have strong impacts on the entire supply chain. The scientific discussions are focused mainly on problems in the primary commodity sector such as the development of electric vehicles, the technological core problems (e. g. battery technology) or the infrastructure. However the impacts on the indirect fields and especially the highly profitable automotive aftermarket are to the greatest extent remain unnoticed. In this area, there is a lack of funded reviews and scientific approaches about how to deal with technology shortages and its impacts. All the different Stakeholders operating in the field of the automotive aftermarket will be affected by this change. But in particular for small and medium-sized car repair shops it is not very easy to generate new innovative and extensive strategies next to their day-to-day business. Within this paper the development of a method will be described, which should help the stakeholders of the automotive aftermarket to reconsider their existing strategy and to find alternative strategies to modify their existing strategy. The usage of this method is very simple and does not require a lot of input to be successful in generating acceptable strategic recommendations. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.