To decide on which technology is best for a vehicle in development, technical and economical constraints need to be considered. The objective of this paper is to provide a generic, conceptual approach to estimating the value (€ or $) per weight unit (kg or lb), referred as lightweight cost, for all industries. It combines general project management and cost estimation techniques with mass property management. As cost and weight are unknown until the actual weighing or billing, this paper focuses on scenario-based assumptions. For an easy understanding, this lens is applied to a recently developed battery concept.

The described approach integrates basic project management processes such as risk management, estimation considerations and cost assessment. In this pursuit, mass and cost are rolled-up based on the breakdown structure. Taking the uncertainties into account a most likely, best, and worst case are evaluated and a cone of respective lightweight cost is generated. For the ease of use in industrial daily business exactly one value per pound for decision making is derived, condensing the lightweight cost range by superimposing the mass and cost according to their specific scenario probability.

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