Plastics in new mobility: An inside story

Autonomous driving, connected vehicles, electrification, car sharing – if the predictions are correct, mobility in the future will look much different from mobility today, as will car interiors. Plastic materials, however, remain essential.

“Some time, in the not so distant future the interior will look completely different and the use case will be completely different, but: it will still all be plastic,” said Yanfeng Automotive Interior Systems Co. Ltd.s Jeff Stout.

So what kind of plastics will these be? As the transition towards a more circular and sustainable economy for plastics gains momentum, it is not yet clear how this will take shape in the automotive industry.

The principles of circularity, on which the European Green Deal is based, call for focusing on reducing demand for non-renewable, finite raw materials by recovering materials at the end of their useful life, reusing these in new products, and designing products for disassembly and repairability.

Today, however, that is not yet a priority. In the past, the focus in the automotive has been on emission levels and weight. Material reclamation at the end of life is still in its infancy.

“With interiors, it is currently not financially viable to strip out the polymers used from the car,” Stout, executive director global Innovation at Yanfeng, said.

“There are no regulations to speak of that are driving this yet. At the moment, automotive shredder residue goes to a landfill. We have no reclamation stream of end-of-life material coming back to our plants in Germany.”

And while there is no legislative basis for practicing design for disassembly, this is something the company takes into account, where it makes sense. For example, in order to reprocess its scrap and defective parts – what Stout refers to as ‘micro-circularity’ - parts must designed to be separated. “We develop processes to make that possible, such as mono-material solutions – where it makes financial sense,” he said. Companies like Yanfeng have enough tools in the toolbox to deliver these solutions, but as long as they are not mandatory, these are not going to be the default.

However, a development that Yanfeng is looking very seriously at is chemical recycling. Other than the post-industrial recycling of its own scrap, the recycled materials derived through mechanical recycling tend not to offer the purity or quality required to meet the quality customers demand. Chemical recycling, where resins are depolymerized back into monomers, which serve as the building blocks for new virgin-like polymers, offers potential. Currently, the problem is that commercial scale processes are available for advanced recycling of polystyrene and PET, neither of which are used on a large scale in the automotive interior market.

“We have to get to a point where we can chemically reprocess the polyolefins  - with PP at the very top, as it is by far the most commonly used material in car interiors - and standard amorphous plastics ABS, PC/ABS, PC, as these four material types make up the vast majority of all the plastic used in the automotive industry,”  Stout said.

The company is currently in the process of evaluating the different processes and companies to see where it makes sense to be the partner or to leverage: “To walk along side and work with those folks to bring that technology to a marketable status.”

A second development envisaged by Stout is even more forward looking. In a future where mobility as a service has a larger market penetration and the players in that space could have a fleet of say tens of thousands of cars, a central location with a system and a warehouse is created where end of life reclamation suddenly becomes feasible.

“It could be a huge enabler for circularity. Individual owners go to a thousand different junkyards all over the country, which makes it much more challenging to have a unified system of reclamation,” he noted.

As the new mobility trends emerge,  plastics, it is clear, will have a significant role to play, not in the least in the development of ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles. As that technology and the business case develops, there will at some point be a desire for a dedicated rideshare car as opposed to a normal car being used in a rideshare environment, and it will have distinctly different interior, evolved from a different set of customer wants.

“It’s going to be a plastic solution, because plastic can do anything,” he explained. “It’s amazingly flexible and based on whatever manufacturing process you choose - blow molding, thermoforming, injection molding - we can make whatever shape needs to be made in whatever use case needs to be made, from plastic. So at the end of the day, at Yanfeng, our standpoint is that at some time in the not so distant future, it’ll look completely different and the use case will be completely different – but it will still all be plastic.”

This will not relate just to lightweighting and electrification, the two most commonly mentioned sustainability ‘hooks’, although Yanfeng is also engaged in numerous lightweighting projects.

“There is a ton of innovation in that space across all our zones,” he said. The company is currently studying the possibility of eliminating metal in the crosscar beam, the structure under the instrument panel that contributes to the stability and safety of the vehicle, replacing it with an all-plastic crosscar beam, with just here and there a metal bracket.

Yanfeng has also been pursuing new material options for decades. Next to wood-fibre filled and other natural fibre filled solutions, the company has also developed a technology it calls CHyM, or Compression Hybrid Mouding, where the primary matrix is a natural fiber mat.

The mat is compressed in an injection mold and reinforced by back injecting a number of ribs.

“The amount of plastic in that construction is quite low, going back to lightweighting, with the total weight -  about 20% less than an all-plastic part,” said Stout. The first instrument panel manufactured entirely using the CHyM process was presented three years ago.

Lignin is another raw material being investigated by the company, who is collaborating with a partner called Prisma that has developed a process to produce a lignin-based ABS-type material. “We’re not doing 100% of that material we are not at that point yet, but 20%  - as a filler to a virgin ABS.”

He noted that the company has also been heavily tracking developments in bio-based plastics, a space that certainly offers opportunities, although the business case is not yet there. ”As research continues in that field I have to believe that there will be a time when that becomes a competitive product as well,” he commented.

“From Yanfeng’s perspective that field is something we are watching; but we are not seeing an immediate application of that that’s around the corner and coming soon. It’s coming, it’s just not coming soon.”

While the ability to reprocess plastics are one aspect of the flexibility that is gained by using plastics, another is their enablement of manufacturing processes that generate little to no secondary scrap – ‘the ability to drive to a net-shaped set of manufacturing processes,’ said Stout.

Net-shape manufacturing refers to processes that produce a shape very close to the desired final (net) one. It enhances sustainability by significantly eliminating the amount of waste generated, and much of the finishing required as well, thus reducing production costs.

“In the reduce, reuse, recycle framework, the first one is reduce. If I don’t have scrap, less energy needed to process that material to get it back into the material stream,” he pointed out.

“Injection molding is a net-shaped process, but processes are also being developed for plastics in terms of skins and other kinds of soft goods that do not produce scrap, that are net-shaped.”

3D printing, too, he added, is generically a net-shaped process. Yanfeng has numerous ongoing innovation projects in the 3D printing space. The process, however, is still in the stage where the value it provides versus the costs to deliver it are being explored.

“One of the things we’re proposing is an armrest skin with a lattice structure that has varying stiffness or softness that can be exactly tuned to the level of softness you want, where you want it. It’s not going to be cheaper than a foam armrest so you still need something more than the fact that it is 3D printed and therefore ‘cool’. We are still looking at when this provides the right feature that allows it to have a business case that’s justifiable,” he explained.

“But yes, 3D printing is part of a sustainability conversation because of its ability to be tuned and tailored with no waste to that product.

One very noticeable trend is one which Stout refers to as ‘green chic’, where it is not just about knowing that a product is environmentally friendly because the label says so, but actually being able to see it, such as in the BMW i3 with its exposed natural fiber.

“We’re seeing a real strong resurgence in that – having an appearance that shows a little authenticity,” he said. “It’s part of the aesthetic.”

Increasingly, automakers are seeking to tie this into a story. After all, a vegan leather solution that no one knows about is just another leather. The story of who grew the plants, who made the material, is what makes it interesting and what people today want to know.

“In the future, if circularity becomes a need, in terms of automakers saying, ‘I need this to be in my next car so you need to get that figured out as soon as possible so that it becomes part of my story’, yes. When we get there, that will absolutely be the story, because if you just have a plastic part in your car and you don’t know it is a bio-based or a post-consumer recycled part – to you it looks just like an ordinary plastic part  - the story is compelling, and it’s something people want to brag about,” he said.

In terms of sustainability, a core foundational issue is the idea of globalization and global specs. In the area of emissions, for example, every region has different odor/VOC issues. The new car smell of a European vehicles is not acceptable in a country like China. Global suppliers have always had to tailor solutions to each region, especially at a material level, to meet different standards in taste and design, but if the fundamental building blocks of the base material change from one region to the other, real problems arise when trying to create scale and a global marketplace.

However, in Jeff Stout’s view, the biggest single challenge ahead is the digital transformation and the effect of this on how an automaker, and by extension, automotive suppliers, interact with the consumer. Tesla, he said, has changed the way an automaker behaves: the traditionally path of development, manufacturing, dealers and consumers who buy new cars every few years has been upended. Automakers now not only face developing electrification solutions, but also mobility services solutions and over-the-air update solutions.  The question is: how do I turn myself from a consumer product into a digital product solution deliverer?” he explained, calling this the existential problem for each automaker today.

“Digitalizaion is the biggest challenge – but also the path to change. Merging digital and plastics together and coming up with smart surfaces, it’s exciting to think about. But then the next step would be to leverage data to provide tailored services to a consumer. What does it mean to us to leverage big data? To monetize data to create a service a customer actually wants?”

Something Yanfeng is exploring in China, for example, is an app for a rideshare car that provides the option of a seat massage. The business model is to sell the seat to the automaker, but to give away the massage function and instead, take a percentage per use, as a fee. In other words, there, the company is selling a service, as well as a product, with all the attendant complications, such as who is responsible for the app or for the functionality of the seat.

“Running a digital services company is much different from what we do today, a completely different business model. How to do it is a big change, but there are a lot of old-school products that have already made the transition – already, doorbells collect data, thermostats collect data, earning money not from selling the product but from what customers do with the product after buying it. We’re headed in that direction, trying to understand how to do that. To date, the value of data has not been leveraged to provide improved services and more efficient services to underwrite the activity.”

What about the impact of the pandemic? There is an increased interest in interior cleanability, said Stout, and post-Covid, there is likely to be a move towards certification that a rideshare car has been sterilized and guarantees that passengers using the service will not be put or exposed into an unhealthy environment. In the short term, Yanfeng has seen an immediate interest in anti-microbial materials and in sanitisation, using UV light to sterilize car interior surfaces, all of which were in the pipeline for a long time, but have now become important.

However, prior to the pandemic, the automotive industry was already undergoing a huge process of disruption in the shape of CASE- Connected, Autonomous, Shared, Electric vehicles and that disruption, said Stout, continues: “The pandemic didn’t change the underlying social pressures or forces that were driving us towards the CASE future in the first place; it just delayed it a little bit.”

Perhaps, he said, there is a more subtle change that is being felt: an new awareness that the outside world can dramatically affect the personal world, and this can impact sustainability and eco-consciousness, in the sense that what is true of a virus, is also true of ecological impacts.

“I think that pre-Covid there was a growing social awareness around for example the buying ethic we have and the impact of what I bought. But post-Covid, there’s even a greater sense that people need to care about what’s going on out there. Because it will absolutely have an effect on what happens privately.”