In the race to design more fuel efficient vehicles, there's a battle brewing over which auto body materials produce the greenest cars.
The automotive arm of the steel industry recently declared itself a contender for the title in the competition where lightweights seemingly have the edge.
No problem, says the auto steel biz, which ballyhooed the results of a three year lifecycle analysis project at the Frankfurt Motor Show last week.
According to the World Steel Association's WorldAutoSteel group and the engineering firm EDAG International, for the project, advanced high strength, lower weight, steel intensive bodies were designed for four types of electric vehicles.
The so called FutureSteelVehicles incorporated the advanced designs for bodies of a battery electric vehicle, a plug in hybrid, a mid size plug EV and a mid size fuel cell electric car that are proposed for 2015 to 2020.
The report said that the body weights of the FSV designs for the battery and fuel cell cars matched those of aluminum auto bodies designed for the same vehicles. Also, the LCA showed that lifecycle emissions for the FSVs were 70% lower than those of comparably sized cars with internal combustion engines.
Mr Cees ten Broek director of WorldAutoSteel said that the research demonstrates the importance of lifecycle assessments in measuring vehicles emissions. Focusing on weight and tailpipe emissions can be deceiving, he suggested.
He added that "When vehicle emissions assessments are focused solely on what comes out of the tailpipe, this encourages use of low-density, greenhouse gas-intensive materials that may provide lighter weight components to improve tailpipe emissions. However, their greenhouse gas intensity may have the unintended consequence of increasing greenhouse gas emissions on a lifecycle basis."
The FSV study results were initially released in May in Brussels, and their presentation at the Frankfurt Motor Show came just one week after Aluminum Association' transportation group released research touting the attributes of that lightweight metal.
In the push to improve fuel economy, automakers have increasingly turned to aluminum to lighten the weight of vehicles in the past 40 years, according to the survey conducted in North America by Ducker Worldwide for the trade group.
The average amount used in cars is expected to hit 343 pounds per vehicle in 2012, that's 5% more than the average of 327 pounds per vehicle in 2009. The report also projected that use of aluminum in the auto industry will continue to grow, reaching an estimated average of 550 pounds in cars and light trucks by 2025 as carmakers try to further reduce vehicle weight by at least 10%.
The report said that aluminum is already the metal of choice for power trains and wheels, and its use in hoods, trunks and doors is on the rise, which took a slap at advanced high strength steel, the stuff in the FSVs.
It added that "Advanced High Strength Steels are growing at the expense of inferior steels, but gauge reduction with AHSS provides limited weight savings potential compared to using lower density aluminum. Pound for pound, aluminum replaces more than twice as much weight as AHSS."
(Sourced from www.greenbiz.com)
