Kano and QFD analyses for autonomous electric car: Design for enhancing customer contentment

Abstract

With the development of new technologies, the services in the automobile sector are rapidly changing. In the ancient times, the manually-driven wheel laid the foundation of transport; while now the world is heading towards self-driving vehicles. These vehicles provide contentment to the customer behaviour through the means of their features like voice-bot and intelligent interface. Moreover, with the introduction of micro-computers, large databases for maintaining such autonomous vehicles can be handled easily. This paper presents a collective study of Kano model analysis and quality function deployment (QFD) in a detailed manner. Different attributes were provided to the potential customers regarding an autonomous electric car in a survey form. The consumers were asked to express their feelings regarding the product if a particular feature is provided and not provided in the product for conducting Kano analysis. Furthermore, QFD was implemented to determine the priority for making improvements in the product profile design. The attributes were mapped to technical metrics/parameters and ranked based on the target customers’ priorities. The output is displayed in a typical house of quality which also consisted of a benchmarking on market competitors. Overall, the paper provides a scientific and engineered framework regarding the attributes which may help the manufacturing organizations re-evaluate their services and come up with efficient and new technological features in the automobile domain.