Title: Reorienting electric mobility research focus on industrialisation issues

Authors: Marc Alochet; Christophe Midler

Addresses: Centre de Recherche en Gestion, Ecole Polytechnique, Bât. Ensta – 828 boulevard des Maréchaux, F-91762 Palaiseau cedex, France ' Centre de Recherche en Gestion, Ecole Polytechnique, Bât. Ensta – 828 boulevard des Maréchaux, F-91762 Palaiseau cedex, France

Abstract: Considering the pace of the EV market, the high level of investment made by carmakers in electric line-up development, scale production units and mobility services, we acknowledge that electromobility dynamics enters now a transitional phase. Industrialisation strategies, predominant in the success of EV market scale up, have been quite neglected till now and, consequently, we state that electric mobility research must be refocused on these issues and introduce a research question: is BEV scale-up, along the whole value chain, driven by reuse of manufacturing assets or pulled by (product) design disruption? We identify two differentiated industrialisation scenarios: one driven by manufacturing assets dependency path, one pulled by the optimised BEV product design strategy whose we discuss benefits, drawbacks and conditions of success. Furthermore, from empirical observations, we confirm that the EV market is in a transitional phase and, based upon observations of some carmakers, we identify strong patterns of a manufacturing assets dependency path regime.

Keywords: EV; scale-up; transitional phase; value chain; industrialisation scenario; manufacturing strategy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJATM.2019.100915

International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management, 2019 Vol.19 No.3/4, pp.229 - 256

Received: 16 Jul 2018
Accepted: 19 Dec 2018
Published online: 19 Jul 2019 *

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