Traditionally, vehicle design is characterised by a strong focus on technical innovations and utilization of technical solutions, configuration and styling, production methods and manufacturing systems.

The vision for the proposed Centre for ECO2 Vehicle Design is that, by year 2015 a world-class research Centre has been established, involving the vehicle manufacturing industry chain from system to component level, government agencies and excellent research groups, jointly focusing on technical solutions leading to improved performance, reliability and safety, with a reduced impact on the environment, enabling a balanced system cost and maintaining comfort in road and rail vehicles. Within the Centre, vehicle design is a holistic process encompassing the involved individuals, technical solutions as well as generated methods.

The novelty of the Centre is twofold: to synthesise and integrate different engineering disciplines in order to perform optimised design, rather than sub-optimising each functional requirement. The second issue is the new perspective for design within the framework of the ECO2-aspects. The Centre will foster a multidisciplinary perspective in the development of future vehicles for roads, terrain and rails, in order to enable technology leaps resulting in products with superior lifecycle costs and performance.

The research programme will be organised around different Virtual Vehicles, one generic vehicle for each vehicle class, truck, train, car and construction equipment.