All vehicles, whether designed to transport primarily people or cargo are compromises. Balancing the various conflicting requirements - needs and wants of the vehicle team - allows the vehicle design compromise to be attained and the vehicle designed, tooled and sold. Typical examples of conflicting requirement are esthetics/styling, occupant space, cargo space and mass capacities, and price/cost. Further, the ability to reconfigure the vehicle, fuel economy and range, crashworthiness and safety standards, ride, handling, NVH, performance metrics, durability, reliability, corrosion resistance, and other customer features are also added. Additional factors that force the vehicle team to make choices and decisions when determining the balance of a vehicle design include investment and capital constraints, assembly and manufacturing labor, local content requirements, assembly ergonomics, and other manufacturing constraints. Attempts at balancing some or all of these conflicting requirements into a car may or may not be successful. The Automotive Body is the "house" where all of these conflicting interests meet and try to co-exist. The success of a vehicle is closely related to making the best tradeoffs, rather than having the best of a single part or metric. Establishing the best answer (for the customer) requires the simultaneous development of product and manufacturing process. This development must also be achieved in a coarse-to-fine methodology so that the most important decisions are made first, followed by progressively less major (but still important) decisions. This coarse-to-fine process must integrate consumer wants and technical realities. If done correctly the integrated "whole" will be greater than the sum of the parts. Establishing a "greater whole" provides the customer with a more-that-expected solution, translating to a win in the highly competitive world automotive market. From an automotive body perspective, a dilemma develops. While the automotive body is the predominant device that envelops the vehicle concept, an optimized body can compromise the vehicle by affecting integration of other components and subsystems. For example, heater performance may be limited due to inadequate air intake flow. A vehicle can become an "outcome" rather than a desired result. This outcome may not be because anyone made mistakes, but due to the decisions that were made during the design process-especially when balancing conflicting needs and inputs. Balancing affects ablility to meet various requirements, choosing the best parts, etc., were made not with the overview of developing the best vehicle. This paper attempts to frame the important "must have" parameters that the Body Engineer should strive to meet - even if the vehicle integration (team or management) does not define and/or support these parameters.
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