‘Let’s Take A Little Risk’

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – Although there’s a burgeoning emphasis on lightweighting, there remain impediments to implementing weight-saving innovations, automakers and suppliers say.

More importantly, they say, those impediments won’t simply go away, no matter how quickly all the stakeholders – including regulators and consumers – would like to see all vehicles go on a diet.

One primary hurdle: the investment-scrutinizing auto industry doesn’t do risk.

“Let’s take a little risk,” prods Matthew Marks, chair of the American Chemistry Council Plastics Div. Auto team and part of a panel on lightweighting at the Management Briefing Seminars here. “Let’s do an aluminum-bodied truck. Let’s do a composite passenger cell.”

Marks, who also is plastics supplier SABIC’s automotive and mass transportation regulatory marketing manager, says despite high-profile advances such as Ford’s aluminum-bodied ʼ15 F-150, to speed the auto sector’s adoption of advanced materials, “No one company can do it alone.”

He says automakers and suppliers need to continue working through consortiums and other types of pre-competitive collaborations in order to further development.

The panel, which included interests from the steel, aluminum and plastics sectors, makes it appear, at least, there’s not quite as much competition between materials suppliers as widely believed. The primary reason: Nearly everyone now seems to understand no single material will displace the others – and automakers and suppliers largely agree each major material group will have specific applications ideal for that material.

“I’m excited at where the market is going in terms of multimaterial use,” says Gregory Fata, automotive technical manager for aluminum producer Alcoa and member of the Aluminum Assn.’s transportation group.

Where the past typically saw openly competitive posturing from the aluminum, steel and plastics players, the new catchphrase is “multimaterial.” Everybody is focused on what their material does best.

The more-enlightened multimaterial mindset is nowhere more apparent than in a common point among the panel members: The industry’s lightweighting effort has to take action, training engineers for a multimaterial understanding. Marks, for example, stresses the need for expanded education programs for engineers “to design and evaluate a multimaterial vehicle.”

Later in the session, Florian Schek, head of lightweight design and vehicle weight at BMW, bolsters the point. “The future (of vehicle design) will be shaped by a multimaterial approach,” he insists.

But wider adoption of advanced materials won’t only be a matter of more broadly educating engineers. Marks says his industry has identified no less than 100 distinct actions to help advance the adoption of lightweight materials.

The primary actions include constructing demonstration facilities to efficiently prove out cutting-edge materials and applications and developing more-sophisticated computer models for lightweight materials.

The panel’s members also broadly agree on several barriers to quicker and more-widespread adoption of lightweighting solutions:

Alcoa’s Fata says his company has addressed some of these barriers with its new “Micromill” facility, designed to produce aluminum that is 30% stronger and exhibits 40% better formability. The Micromill also can produce aluminum sheet from molten aluminum in 20 minutes rather than the more-common 20 hours.

The panelists agree the use of lightweight materials is expanding, even if not at the pace or cost of development they might prefer. Fata presents data showing, for example, the industry’s use of aluminum sheet is progressing from 100,000 metric tons in 2012 to a projected 450,000-plus this year – and a forecast 1 million by 2020.