Lightening the load: new materials for automotive

We’re in a brave new world of engineering innovation, with new inventions and developments enriching our lives every day. Yet some aspects of the devices we depend on have changed little from their inception. It might seem like a contradiction, but sometimes even the most innovative sectors find there are barriers to innovation.

Take, for example, the most visible example of the way technology changed our lives in the last century: the motor car. In many ways, the cars on the roads today are unrecognisable from the contraptions and  the early fruits of mass production that trundled down the roads of the 1910s and 1920s. But in others, they have changed very little.

‘People have the perception that cars are basically steel boxes with glass windows, and there’s a good reason for that perception,’ said Prof Richard Dashwood, head of materials and sustainability at the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) and chief technology officer of the new High Value Manufacturing Catapult centre. ‘It is because, largely, they are. Something like 99.9 per cent of all cars on the road are steel-intensive vehicles.’