Experts: Lots of opportunity available in ​auto market

Detroit —​ Opportunities for new materials and processes in the automotive sector are abundant, as automakers and suppliers increasingly feel the pressure to reduce weight and lower costs.

But reaching those goals will require a multitude of approaches such as learning from previous strategies, pursuing multimaterial applications and ongoing collaboration among the OEMs, material suppliers and parts makers, according to three speakers at Antec.

"If you don't look where you've been, you don't know where you're going. And for a long time, nobody in the industry cared about weight," Alan Taub, a professor of materials science and engineering as well as mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, told conference attendees.

Taub is also a senior technical adviser at LIFT (Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow), a public-private partnership focused on the development of advanced lightweight materials and manufacturing methods. He provided a historical overview of the auto industry's use of materials such as steel, wood, aluminum, plastics and others, during a March 18 keynote address.

For decades, the name of the game was "how fast you could accelerate and how beautiful the car looked," Taub said. "Nobody talked about sustainability. Nobody talked about environmental impact."

But the name of the game has changed.

"We have entered an era where true weight reductions are occurring," he said.

The majority of fuel economy gains come from improved engine and transmission performance as well as the introduction of partial and full electrification, but Taub said about 15 percent comes from weight reduction.

"A good rule of thumb? If I decrease the weight of a car by 10 percent, I can get a 6 percent fuel economy improvement," said Taub, adding that the first step for achieving weight reduction is improving design.

This includes not only deploying better mechanical design, but also swapping materials, which have improved over the years in terms of their lightweight attributes.

The auto industry has gradually migrated from the idea of a single-material intensive vehicle to now using the right material, produced the right way and put in the right part of the vehicle, Taub said.

"Our designers know how to do that," he said. "And our plant managers are no longer afraid of doing that."

High-strength steel, for example, used to be limited to a 15 percent weight reduction but today can achieve as much as 25 percent, according to Taub, who used low-carbon steel as the baseline. Glass fiber-reinforced composites are in the range of 30 percent.

Taub also had some stark words for those working in plastics, as Ford's aluminum-bodied F-150 pickup truck rides the wave of a record-setting sales year in 2018: "I hate to put it this way, but this is your competition and, so far, it is still winning that race," he said of aluminum.

Carbon fiber-reinforced composites are the material that can give the auto industry its lowest weight vehicle, Taub said, but tough barriers such as cost and the high-energy intensive nature of its manufacturing process remain.

"Where are we?" he asked. "The incumbent material folks want to keep their share of the market."

Rose Ryntz, president of Ryntz & Associates LLC, said weight reduction and lightweighting have been around for a long time in the automotive industry.

"For the past 10 years, that's been a mandate. It's an expectation now," she said. "And most OEMs do not pay for weight reduction."

If the average curb weight of a vehicle is roughly 3,700 pounds, Ryntz said, in order to meet 2025 standards of 54.5 mpg, the weight would have to be reduced in the vehicle by another 560 or so pounds.

"That can't be done all in plastics," she said.

Further weight reductions will be achieved through various materials, including the use of metal alloys on aluminum and high-strength steel, in conjunction with plastics.

Ryntz, who resigned last year as vice president of advanced development and material engineering at International Automotive Components Group, a global supplier of instrument panels, center consoles and door trims, spoke on the progression of polypropylene and thermoplastic polyolefins (TPO) in interior and exterior applications.

"If I look at the rearview mirror of where we've been, we've had polycarbonate-type substrates. We've gone to TPO materials — that's still in the sideview mirror," she said. "Where are we going? That mirror will be gone. We're going to more crafted materials, talking about multilayer structures, different adhesives, different types of materials all the way from PVCs to TPOs to natural leather."

At Magna Exteriors, a division of global automotive supplier Magna International Inc., collaboration among OEMs, material suppliers and parts makers has supported several lightweight developments such as reducing the density in wall stocks on fascias and exterior trim components.

But Mark Pilette, global product line director for exterior trim, said that collaboration process needs to continue.

"We need to push the material needle even further," he said during a session on driving innovation and material collaboration for exterior parts.

A big focus at Magna has been on drag reduction and improving the range of electrified vehicles, especially as consumers steer their vehicle preferences toward SUVs and CUVs. In fact, more than half of vehicles produced today, he said, contain a hatch or a rear liftgate closure.

"This trend with CUVs and SUVs offers an increasing opportunity for reducing weight at the rare of the vehicle," Pilette said. "And liftgates, which once were metallic intensive, are now focusing on alternate material solutions to reduce that mass."

Magna's thermoplastic liftgates are already outfitted on several vehicles on the road today, including the 2019 Jeep Cherokee. Pilette said the company wants to replace even more body panels, including doors and hoods, with TPO or other lightweight materials.

"Cars will look different, but they still need to have beautiful shapes and finishes, and advanced plastics will help us get there," he said.