Automotive Industry 5.0: What is it and how does it affect us?

Effectively, the industry has jumped up from 4.0 to industry 5.0. Therefore, the framework of the industry of automotive component suppliers has too.

What does this jump mean? The 4.0 status contemplated the industry’s digitalization which has made possible relevant advances such as IoT -the Internet of things- setting up synergies between artificial intelligence and big data and even the birth of business-intelligence-based processes. Thanks to all this digitalization-induced progress, new decision-making models have emerged and got smarter thanks to the application of digital technology minimizing human intervention.

However, industry 5.0 places human capital again at the core of the process without writing off technology but in the search of a balance between the role of technology and the professionals so that by complimenting each other they can maximize the benefits.

In the automotive industry 5.0 framework, the automotive component suppliers will meet their production model to the 5.0 one, where both people and machines will team up in factories so decision-making becomes economically profitable.

In this way, people and machine’s roles are complementary. People will provide creativity and strategic vision while devices will take care of more repetitive tasks. All these into a commitment of sustainability-oriented policies.

Expected benefits of the automotive industry 5.0

For the European commission, the industry 5.0 is meant to be the industrial revolution of the people. According to the communitarian institution, research and innovation will trigger a transition to a more sustainable, resilient and people-based European industry. Value will not only be search for stakeholders but for all involved parts.

Focusing on the automotive industry 5.0, More specifically from the automotive components suppliers’ scope, the path to follow must be guided by innovation.

According to an analysis by the European Commission, the European Union’s automotive industry is very competitive but the globalized economic context in which we play is every time more complex due to the very changing geopolitical landscape. “It is efficient and rentable but vulnerable to the ups-and-downs of the long value chain” they state.

Thus they underline that only by automotive innovation, the European car industry can improve its efficiency in several points along the value chain, increase its production system flexibility to satisfy the quickly changing consumer demands in a globalized economy while keeping up with being a world reference in quality.

Such innovation, the commission continues, should mostly follow a criterion of responsibility, providing benefit to all agents involved: from investors to employees, with clients, society and environment in between rather than only maximizing the economic gain.

Sernauto, Institution belonging to Autoparts from Spain, considers that automotive industry 5.0 to be defined by:

• Customize production, with a wide range of adapted products to individual necessities
• Artificial intelligence with collaborative robots which hand-in-hand with human ingenuity will create products
• Human empowerment, as dangerous, mechanical and repetitive tasks will be trusted to artificial intelligence, then people will perform tasks requiring human-reasoning.
• Speed and quality, with a more agile and qualified production thanks to the machine-human collaboration.
• Environmental respect, the technological improvement will be translated in renewable energy-based production.

As far as we are concerned, companies belonging to Autoparts from Spain are already working towards this new automotive industry 5.0 model. Which we consider to be the proper one due to this joint effort proposed between technology and human capital, this last one is a highlight of the automotive component Industry in Spain whose workforce is highly qualified. In our opinion, the tandem proposed by this fifth industrial revolution is the suitable paradigm both for the automotive component suppliers and the automotive industry and therefore  fro the industrial business in general.