Different Homes, Shared Chassis: Revisiting the Automotive Lesson for Housing
In January 2024, we wrote the blog “Design or production—what should the construction industry be learning from the automotive industry?”
The blog explored Volkswagen’s MQB platform and asked whether housing could adopt a similar approach: common room modules, coordinated components and flexibility in how homes are configured.
Nearly three years later, that question feels increasingly relevant to our work at Creu Cartref.
One platform, different products
Volkswagen’s MQB provides a shared engineering basis for vehicles including the Golf, Passat, Touran and Atlas; Audi A3, Q2 and TT; Škoda Octavia and Superb; and SEAT Leon.
A sports car, a family hatchback and a large SUV can share platform principles while looking and functioning quite differently.
MQB is an adaptable toolkit, not an identical chassis beneath every vehicle. Certain relationships remain consistent, while dimensions such as wheelbase and track width can vary.
Common engineering relationships, with defined opportunities to vary dimensions.
The lesson for housing is to decide what stays fixed, what can change, and how those changes work.
What would a housing chassis look like?
A housing chassis could establish a coordinated structural grid, floor spans, stair position, service zones and connections between components.
Around that framework, homes could vary in size, configuration and appearance.
Different products and identities, supported by a shared platform approach.
A terrace, a semi-detached home and a larger family dwelling might retain common construction relationships while responding differently to their occupants and surroundings.
But adaptability needs to be designed in. Adding a bedroom should follow an understood rule. Selecting a different external wall should use a developed interface. Otherwise, each variation risks reopening the technical design.
How does this connect to Creu Cartref?
Our room-module approach explores how a limited family of spaces can create different housetypes. The chassis conversation takes that further: can those combinations retain common structural arrangements, panel families and service routes?
Creu Cartref's Eilio housetype development into a kit of parts is a practical opportunity to explore those relationships, including how they respond to sloping sites as covered in our recent blog ' Beyond the patternbook - turning Eilio into a kit of parts'.
Tai ar y Cyd raises a related question. Its shared house types, guidance, details and performance specifications provide a substantial starting point. Could families of those homes share more of their underlying construction logic?
This is where platform DfMA—design for manufacture and assembly—becomes useful: developing reusable components and interfaces across a family of homes.
In our blog 'Why does the Housing Industry Need a Delivery Ecosystem' we've spoken about how to support that approach through coordinated, repeatable Stage 4 information, clear options and feedback from manufacture and construction supporting Creu Cartref, Tai ar y Cyd or other housetypes.
The question worth carrying forward
Sites will still need individual responses. Different construction systems will need their own developed solutions.
But could more homes begin with an underlying framework whose relationships have already been resolved?
Reflecting on our blog from January 2024, that is the opportunity we still see:
Different homes, a shared chassis—and less work reinvented between them.
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