Completed Materials & Manufacturing Engineering

High Volume Lightweight Technologies for Vehicle Structures (HiLiTe)

Funder InnovateUK (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Far-uk LTD
Funding £1.9M
Period Mar 2014 — May 2017

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A consortium of automotive manufacturers, universities, and specialist firms is trying to make car body parts out of lightweight composite materials as quickly and cheaply as steel. The problem is that composites—strong, light materials made from fibres and resin—are currently too slow and expensive for mass production. A single part can take ten times longer to make than a metal equivalent, and the process generates significant waste. Composites also cannot survive the high-temperature paint ovens used on standard assembly lines, forcing manufacturers to add costly extra steps. If the project succeeds, carmakers could replace heavy steel panels with lighter composites without slowing down production. That would cut vehicle weight, improving fuel efficiency or extending the range of electric cars. The impact would be felt in the factory itself—on the speed of the production line, the cost of each part, and the amount of material thrown away. For the driver, the result would be a lighter, more efficient car that costs no more to build than a conventional one.

View original technical description
The project is a collaboration between Tata Motors European Technical Centre, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Motors, India’s largest automotive company and owner of Jaguar Land Rover, two higher educational establishments: Warwick Manufacturing Group part of the University of Warwick and the National Composites Centre, and two SMEs: Expert Tooling and Automation a leading supplier of automation and assembly systems to automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers and FAR-UK a new design and manufacturing consultancy but with over 20 years of automotive composites experience. The programme will address the current limitations preventing high volume usage of composite components in the automotive industry. These limitations are: 1. Material and processing cost – making them uncompetitive compared to metallic solutions 2. Processing time - current too long by an order of magnitude. 3. Lower volume techniques generate a high percentage of waste material. 4. Incompatibility with post production processes used in high volumes e.g. the high temperatures used in E coat and paint application.

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Related Research

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Original classification

Collaborative R&D

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.