News Release - Magna Demonstrates Lightweighting Expertise with Ultralight Door Module
- Team reimagined a door architecture from scratch
- Ultralight design achieves 42.5-percent mass savings
- Applies to 70 percent of the light vehicle market
Magna's advanced engineering team – a collaborative effort between the company's corporate R&D and various product groups – combined its unique, full-vehicle perspective on the design of a driver's-side door with an inventive mix of materials and technology to tackle the challenge of significant weight reduction. This was developed in less than 10 months while keeping the cost within accepted industry parameters and providing a solution that applies to approximately 70 percent of the light vehicle market.
"The team started from scratch and reimagined the way we think about the design, development and material-use of a door architecture," said
Magna built on its know-how from the development of the Multi-Material Lightweight Vehicle (MMLV) with the DOE and Ford in 2014, and took it a step further in creating a solution for this advanced ultralight door project.
A key innovation associated with the development of the ultralight door includes integration of Magna's SmartLatch™ electronic latch system. This eliminated the need for mechanical hardware and enabled the development of a unique carrier module with integrated glass guides and lift capability of a lightweight hybrid glass laminate, an industry first.
The door-in-white assembly makes extensive use of aluminum, which achieves approximately half of the total mass reduction of the door assembly. Overall, the project makes use of materials readily available today that can easily be made using existing manufacturing processes, without a significant increase in production costs or changes in body-shop infrastructure.
The ultralight door development included intensive simulation efforts, passing all safety and durability testing in the process. The next steps include manufacturing full-scale prototype door assemblies, performance tests and safety tests to validate the design, with the goal of being available for use in production vehicles by the fall of 2020.
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TAGS
Automotive innovation, public-private partnership, automotive lightweighting, lightweight door
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