Held in May, the event attracted a stellar cast of heavyweight speakers, including Ford Motor Company, Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover, to discuss car lightweighting developments taking place within the automotive arena.
With everyone strapped into their seats, delegates - including leading UK composite manufacturing SMEs, academia and university representatives - looked forward to illuminating talks from the UK’s leading car makers and even some ringing endorsements that collectively, UK manufacturing is on the road to success.
But no, the assembled throng received an unexpected wake-up call that sucked the life out of the room as one by one, the facts and figures presented an uncomfortable analysis of why the UK’s composites manufacturing industry isn’t ready for the automotive production rate challenge after all.
Automotive OEM uncertainty stems from concerns that CFRP production run rates won’t match the sub two-minute per car rates using existing metallic materials. Then there’s the issues of storing and maintaining resins, managing waste material, future requirements in maintaining both metallic production lines (to continue servicing spare part requirements) and running concurrent composites production lines - all whilst maintaining an economical cost of manufacture.
The OEMs have thrown down their driving gloves! It shows that adopters like the aerospace industry aren’t so governed by production rate demands. It also underlines the fact that CFRP materials are perhaps a little over-specified for the carmakers’ tastes. Strange that the topic of the EU’s 2020 CO2 car emissions regulations never came up during the presentations though. Isn’t this the main reason why we’re driving down this particular road in the first place?
Mike Richardson, editor
