Reorienting electric mobility research focus on industrialisation issues

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.