Europe’s leading car manufacturers, including Daimler, Volvo, Opel, Toyota, Volkswagen and CRF – the Research Center of FCA, together with the rest of ALLIANCE have announced the winners of the Lightweight Open Innovation Challenge (LOIC), which aims to reduce vehicle energy consumption and carbon emissions through innovative and affordable solutions to reducing the weight of cars.
The four winners: F.Tech from Japan/Germany - with a manufacturing technology for complex stamping of high strength steels -, Imperial College London from the UK - with a manufacturing technology for fast warm stamping of sheet metals -, Outokumpu from Germany - with a combination of stainless steel materials and their respective manufacturing technologies -, and Vestaro also from Germany - with an epoxy-based resin system - are already in touch with relevant manufacturers, suppliers and knowledge partners within ALLIANCE and working on their technologies, as chosen by ika-RWTH and Bax & Company.
The technologies of the four winners will be evaluated and presented at the side event of the Aachen Body Engineering Days on September 20.
The challenge, which was also presented to delegates at the recent Future Aluminium Forum, received 22 applications from nine countries - a real success given the topic and scope. LOIC’s objective was to discover organisations working with innovative lightweight technologies and to further develop their solutions, by connecting them with large industrial players.
The selection criteria ensured a high quality of the selected applications. This included whether the proposed idea met the challenges arising from cutting transport CO2 emissions by at least 40% by 2030, and reducing the weight of vehicles by 25% while complying with strict cost targets.
Although only four winners were chosen, the partners have identified many more innovative solutions and are in contact with them to support their development in any way they can.