Technical Path and Case Analysis of Lightweight Forward Engineering for Vehicle Development and Design

The importance of weight reduction in vehicle design is well known. In recent years, OEMs have been working on vehicle lightweight research and application, particularly for new energy vehicles. Currently, many Chinese OEMs establish a lightweight target and expect that weight savings will be distributed among the vehicle’s various systems.  This tends to keep the weight reduction effort at the level of parts or partial weight loss design development and application. To be truly effective, vehicle lightweight design and development must be a top-level sequential engineering process, which is gradually distributed and implemented from top to bottom following a reasonable technical route. The Chinese automobile has experienced significant improvements in functional design, performance design, quality design, and is now moving towards robust design and lightweight sequential engineering. This course is designed to meet the needs of the OEM to teach the concept of lightweight sequential engineering and typical lightweight cases of body-in-white (BIW) parts.  In addition, the basic technical path and top-level design methods are presented through two complete cases of both a traditional vehicle and an ultra-light new energy vehicle for understanding the vehicle lightweight design process.