Research Overview

The purpose-built vehicle (PBV) market is a new business model in the automotive industry that involves original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) designing, manufacturing, and selling highly customized vehicles according to customers’ application needs. There are high demand and competition in the shared mobility market, ride-hailing services, and last and middle-mile cargo delivery services. As such, service providers in these areas need customized vehicles with components and features that will be useful for their customers and enable them to achieve high customer satisfaction levels.

The PBV market has many automotive startups such as REE Automotive, Arrival, and Canoo that design and develop electric, purpose-built, and tailor-made vehicles to suit particular applications. Several conventional automotive OEMs like Hyundai, Kia, Ford, and Renault also seek business opportunities in this market, converting their existing vehicle models into PBVs.

Frost & Sullivan aims to provide insights into the PBV market by defining PBVs and their segmentation by application. We conducted case studies on market participants, highlighting technology trends, how they tailor vehicles according to specific applications, and details of vehicles they plan to launch. The report also compares conventional vehicles' design and manufacturing processes against PBVs and analyzes the latter's advantages in terms of operations.