Lasers in European Automotive Manufacturing. Historical review and recent trends

One of the big challenges for a manufacturing technology is to be approved for serial automotive production. Stringent production cycles as well as high quality, safety and environmental standards and keen price competition make automobile one of the toughest industrial sectors. Laser material processing started to receive attention as a manufacturing option and an innovative technique for new automotive product and production solutions 30 years ago. Looking back, the automobile industry with its high demands on reliability, productivity, profitability and innovation remains one of the big drivers and beneficiaries of the continuous improvements of laser sources, systems and processes. This article demonstrates that the special capabilities of laser-supported manufacturing technologies cope very well with the persistent trends in auto industry, such as lighter weight to be achieved by new materials, designs and processes, and more frequent model changes with multifaceted variants to be accomplished by flexible production lines. It also provides a historical review of milestones, and highlights laser cutting and joining applications in Europe's auto industry by quoting more than 100 industrial examples, in order to pay tribute to pioneer work and to present recent developments and progress in laser manufacturing of automobiles.