Development of the ebike

Table of Contents

Introduction

Questionnaire

Hierarchical organization of the customer needs

Relative Importance

Product / Target Specification

Conceptual Design Ideas

Hub wheel Concept

Top Wheel Concept

The side-wheel concept

Literature

Introduction

On the following pages we are going to describe the development of an “e-bike” motor. There are some requirements for the motor, which have to be considered. Today there are already different types of e-bikes. Almost all of them have fixed batteries and drive units. That means it is not possible to change the motor onto another bike, at least it would be very difficult. Our task now is to develop a motor, which is easily to change onto other bikes.

To accomplish such a development it is necessary to make a proceeding plan. We took the structure from the book (..) as a guideline.

- The first step is the Product Plan. It consists some pre planning, the mission statement to define the requirements and the project plan which is the schedule for the development.
- For the next we tried to Identify Customer Needs. To gather some data about customers we made a questionnaire. This data we tried to interpret in a customer needs table we also made a hierarchy of the most important requirements. After that we selected the customers, which could come in question.
- In third step we established Target Specifications. One of it was the product specification with metrics and the target values.
- The next step was the Generation of the Product Concept. Here we made different concept to for gaining ideas e.g. brainstorming, 6-3-5 – method. After that we researched on the Internet and made benchmarking to get more and better information about the different parts of the product.
- The last step was the Selection of the Product Concept. We developed 3 different concepts and decided by the pros and cons about the final one we should choose.

On the basis of these five points our report is structured.

Questionnaire

According to our mission statement, we recognized elderly people as our primary target group for our e-bike. To get an idea of the customer needs, we decided to make interviews with the primary target group. Therefore we had to interview people aged around their 60ies.

Since there are very few people at university in this age and we expected to have serious language problems when interviewing Swedish citizens in this group of age, we decided to interview Swedish guest families, friends and relatives in our home country, providing us we an international Europe wide source of customer needs.

Since the shortage of time we further decided to interview this people by telephone or email.

The questionnaire is split in two parts. Part one dealt with bicycling in general and personal information about the interviewed:

- Age

- Do you have a bike?

- Why?
- Why not?

- What do you like about biking?

- What do you use your bike for?

- Transport
- Sport
- Etc.

- How frequently?

- On what distances?

- What are the drawbacks?

- What would be the properties of a "perfect" bike?

The second part dealt with more specific questions about our product idea of an additional propulsion of the bike:

Let's say there was a gadget for your bike which would assist you when

cycling up slopes or against the wind.

- Would you consider that useful?

- When yes: what are your expectations about the features? (duration of energy)
- When not: Why don’t you consider it as useful?

- Can you imagine more situations in which this "extra power" would come in handy?

- How much would you be willing to pay for it?

- What budget do you invest in your bike per year?

- Do you find any reason to be sceptic about the idea?

- What extra features would you like it to have?

Based on this interviews we compiled a list with the customer needs (a rough verbal answer of the customer to the question) and a translation into interpreted needs (done by us afterwards while analysing the data), see following Table 1. The X’s in brackets following the customer needs indicate how often this certain need was mentioned (with a scale from one to three x’s).

The table consists out of the four rows: typical use, likes current situation, dislike current situation and suggested improvements, which reflect the four main kind of questions in the questionnaire. The table is separated into three columns: Question/Prompt, Customer Statement and Interpreted needs.

Table 1: Customer needs and Interpreted needs

illustration not visible in this excerpt

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