FutureCarProduction: Comprehensive approaches for the evaluation and development of integral car body concepts for sustainable vehicle manufacturing

Project description

The transition to electric mobility is considered an important building block for achieving the EU's climate-neutral mobility targets by 2050. While approximately 80% of CO2 emissions from combustion engines are generated by exhaust gases during usage, production is the decisive factor for CO2 emissions generated by electric vehicles. After the battery, the car body is the second largest source of emissions. Consequently, new car body concepts are needed that ensure ecological sustainability as well as technical safety and economic efficiency.

In current car body production, more than a hundred individually stamped metal parts are usually welded together to form the car body. An alternative to this is Tesla's giga-casting technology, in which highly integrated large parts are cast as a single piece from aluminum. This drastically reduces the number of components required, makes production more efficient, and shortens manufacturing time. Compared to conventional manufacturing, the increased materials utilization rate also saves on the cost of materials as well as CO2 emissions. However, there are also critical voices pointing out potential shortcomings of this new approach in terms of materials quality, repairability, and crash safety.

This is where the FutureCarProduction project comes in: The project consortium, consisting of eight Fraunhofer Institutes, addresses these challenges regarding energy and materials use, circular economy, repairability, and structural integrity by developing a comprehensive assessment of the giga-casting technology and other innovative manufacturing concepts (e.g., semi-integrated approaches).

The project pursues the following goals:

• Development of a holistic design and evaluation methodology for vehicle and body architectures that considers both conventional and innovative manufacturing processes.
• Implementation of Re-X processes that promote the reuse of materials, as well as the development of concepts for re-use, re-manufacturing, and recycling.
• Validation of the developed technologies and methods on a demonstrator based on a segment of a car body, which will be evaluated at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5-6.

FutureCarProduction thus provides the automotive and supplier industries with sound decision-making foundations as well as methodologies for strategically and sustainably planning investments in new manufacturing technologies and facilities.