Vehicle Design

Changes resulting from new vehicle technologies, new forms of use, legal requirements or social needs, such as demographic change, demand solutions for flexible multimodal mobility.

In cooperation with its partners, the laboratory develops solutions for real problems: micro-vehicles of micro-mobility, the mobility of mobility-impaired people or ideas for avoiding traffic congestion in inner cities.

In the Laboratory for Vehicle and Mobility Concepts, creative ideas of young bachelor and master students are turned into elaborated vehicle and mobility concepts.
Modern product development processes which lead the project teams from market research, design, construction and simulation to prototype construction support the development.

Automotive engineers test their skills as designers

Within one semester, students in the Vehicle Concepts & Integration module learn the essential stages of a vehicle development process in a quick tour and do not stop at the design process. As a special offer, the students of the module were able to produce their own vehicle models in clay during the summer semester 2017. Professor Hatto Grosse of the Cologne International School of Design (KISD) was on hand to assist them. The aim of this event was to raise awareness of clay as a material, which is still used in the creation of concepts for vehicle models despite all the simulation possibilities.

EPDS: Complex development processes simplified for higher education

A development process includes the preliminary and actual product development, which results in prototypes or a market-ready product. The iterative character of the real development process can hardly be applied to the classical schedule at a university, which is why the EDPS (educational product development system) was developed for university teaching. This is a generalized product development process that can be applied to a wide variety of projects, especially in the automotive industry. Students are assisted in approaching problems in a structured way, so that the project goal is achieved efficiently and in a focused manner.