Ricardo and SupplierBusiness Collaborate on Major Automotive Technology Roadmap Report

VAN BUREN TWP., Mich., January 22, 2009: In a major report published today, experts from all parts of the Ricardo organization have supported SupplierBusiness to provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging technologies that will shape the future of the auto industry through the next decade and beyond.

The Automotive Technology Roadmap is a unique collaboration between automotive business publisher SupplierBusiness, part of the IHS Global Insight group, and Ricardo. The report sets out the key drivers of change within the auto industry and analyses the current framework of competition for customers in terms of parameters including product performance, safety, OEM corporate structure, cost base and ownership, and supply chain issues and economies of scale. The report goes on to examine each aspect of the vehicle in turn, including body structure, electrical and electronic control systems, passive and active safety systems, climate control, brakes, steering, suspension, wheels, chassis, driveline and transmission systems, advanced engine technologies, alternative fuels, hybrid systems, energy management and fuel cell vehicle systems. In each case, a comprehensive analysis of current state-of-the-art products is provided, together with the vision of the authors for the deployment of new technologies - including major potential disruptors - over a time horizon of approximately twenty years. For each section Ricardo specialists have contributed their own insights and reviewed and validated the information gathered from external sources by SupplierBusiness. As such, while there is naturally much detailed level information that must remain confidential to Ricardo, the report provides a rigorous and well-researched vision of the future development of automotive technology which will be of significant value to SupplierBusiness customers.

Ian Kershaw, managing director of Ricardo Strategic Consulting in Northern Europe, said: "We are pleased to have partnered SupplierBusiness in the preparation of the Automotive Technology Roadmap report. Running to well in excess of three hundred pages, this report provides perhaps the most thoroughgoing examination currently available in published form of the likely technological development of the automobile over the next twenty years. Within the limits of what Ricardo can publicly disclose while protecting our clients' confidentiality, the comprehensive nature of the analysis provided is likely to be extremely useful those engaged at all levels within the global automotive industry, including investors."