ALIVE · Advanced High Volume Affordable Lightweighting for Future Electric Vehicles

By bringing together 21 partners including 7 major carmakers, 7 major suppliers, 2 SME's and 5 academia / research centres, ALIVE will develop directly exploitable knowledge on materials and design concepts which offer a high potential for significantly reducing the weight of vehicles for affordable application to high productions volumes, focusing on next generation Electric Vehicles (EVs).Specifically ALIVE has set a target of achieving a 30% + 20% weight reduction for the untrimmed vehicle body together with a 25-30% weight reduction of the hang-on parts, chassis and main interior sub-systems. ALIVE strives to generate substantial, tangible innovation in terms of vehicle design, materials, forming & joining technologies, simulation & testing and includes an exceptionally ambitious physical validation activity that will not only deliver a full structural demonstrator of all modules addressed but which will also include destructive crash and durability testing executed on the assembled modules including the entire body.The objective of the car manufacturers and the supply chain within the ALIVE consortium is to accelerate the take up of these innovative technologies, enabling their application in high volume EV production some 5 years earlier than would have been the case otherwise. Importantly the aim is to jointly exploit the potential economies of scale which can only be achieved via pre-competitive collaborative research by identifying and applying common solutions in terms of materials and their respective process technologies.ALIVE is directly linked to a network of recently concluded, on-going and planned parallel activities and as such offers a coordinated platform within the context of the Green Car program for achieving an unprecedented level of impact with respect to increasing EU competitiveness through the development and uptake of real innovation.