Toyota is implementing various technical developments in various fields for protection of environment. Reducing the fuel consumption is a matter of great urgency for the reduction of CO2 emissions. In the technology of vehicle body development, mass reduction and the improvement of aerodynamics are mainly important for fuel economy.
As the one of way for this, we adopted resin glass as the back door glass of ES3, small-sized low-fuel consumption vehicle. (Figure 1,2,3)
The first advantage of resin glass is the low density that weights about a half of inorganic glass. However resin glass is needed higher thickness for equivalent rigidity, as the result approximately 41% mass reduction was achieved.
However resin glass is relatively expensive. Therefore it seems to be difficult to expand the usage of resin for this application.
Then, we focused on additional advantage of resin glass, in order to make good use of resin glass. The second advantage of resin glass is design flexibility. This can create the flexible styling of canopy styled back door glass that is unattainable with inorganic glass. While achieving mass reduction and the improvement of aerodynamics, styling value was also added.
This paper describes about the performance of this vehicle, injection-molding technology and subjects in the future.
