Not the Delorean Revisited: An Assessment of the Competitive Position of a Stainless Steel Body-in-White

Autokinetics is a Rochester Hills MI design firm working with Armco, a supplier of stainless steel. Together, they have developed an architecture that replaces the traditional stamped and spot welded steel unibody with a novel stainless steel spaceframe architecture.

• Fabrication
  • Rollformings
  • Thin wall castings
  • Progressive die stampings
  • Plastic support and exterior panels
• Assembly
  - Spot, laser, and MIG welding

Relative to conventional steel unibodies, the Autokinetics spaceframe architecture offers a number of projected advantages.

• Substantial mass reduction
• Increased safety
• Improved ride and NVH
• More flexible packaging
• Lower lifecycle impact
• Potential for paint shop elimination

The obvious question that arises, and the one that this paper will answer, is: How does the Autokinetics spaceframe architecture compete on cost?