Jaguar Land Rover is heating aluminium panels before stamping them, so the metal flows like steel rather than cracking or wrinkling under the press. The problem is straightforward: aluminium body structures save weight and improve vehicle performance, but aluminium is harder to shape than steel. That forces manufacturers to use more individual parts and more complex assembly steps, which drives up the cost of press tools and body-in-white facilities. The warm forming process—essentially a middle ground between slow, expensive superplastic forming for low-volume production and conventional cold stamping for high volumes—aims to give aluminium the same formability as steel. If the technology works at production scale, it could reduce the number of structural parts needed per vehicle, simplify assembly, and lower tooling costs. That matters because car manufacturing is a capital-intensive industry where even modest savings per vehicle programme free up investment for other priorities. The process also cuts energy use in manufacturing, helping automakers meet their carbon reduction targets. The research is applied and commercially driven, with a clear path to deployment in premium vehicle production.
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Jaguar Land Rover is now one of the global leaders in the manufacture of complete aluminium automotive body structures. Whilst delivering significant enhancement to final product performance this slrategy does have huge implication in terms of manufacturing investment, with up lo £200M spent wilh every vehicle programme on press lools & BIW (body-in-white) facilities. A proportion of this cost is due simply to the selection of aluminium rather than steel and its reduced formability driving simpler more numerous parts, wilh more sub-assembly lo create the required levels of complexity. This projecl will industrialise the innovative warm forming concept, in essence marrying the commercially existing worlds of super plastic forming for niche production with the conventional cold processing technique used in volume production today. It will provide a manufacturing process specifically optimised for Premium vehicle production, the aim being to achieve steel formability with aluminium and hence steel investmeni levels with savings of up to £20M per vehicle programme. In press tooling terms we envisage a 40% reduction in the capital & revenue costs associated with the consolidation of 30 key structural componenls through the application of this technology. Such a reduction in part count, tooling & facilities, will in addition, contribute towards JLR's improved Carbon Footprint, as they look lo further 'green' their manufacturing processes and in doing so achieve the target of a 25% reduction in Manufacturing Carbon Footprint by 2015.
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