Mobius

Car bodies waste half their material during manufacturing, and most of what remains gets downcycled into lower-grade products at the end of a vehicle’s life. This matters because after the battery, the car body is the largest source of carbon emissions tied to a new vehicle’s production. Today’s design tools do not optimise for carbon footprint—they prioritise weight, cost, and crash performance, leaving material efficiency and recyclability as afterthoughts. The result: high-grade aluminium and steel are used once, then lost to lower-value uses. The MOBIUS project builds AI-powered digital toolkits that let designers lock in materially efficient choices from the earliest stages of vehicle development. If successful, the tools could cut body-structure emissions by 75 percent while reducing development timescales and improving cost competitiveness. That would reshape how car bodies are designed, manufactured, and eventually recycled—turning a linear, wasteful process into one that keeps high-grade materials in circulation. The impact sits inside supply chains and factory floors, not in a driver’s daily experience, but it directly supports the UK’s net-zero manufacturing strategy.