Currently, around 50% of every car is made of plastic, making up as little as 10 to 12% of its total weight and allowing for greater efficiency to be achieved. However, this wasn’t always the case. In the early days of the automobile industry, cars were made of metal and were extremely heavy, slow and inefficient. Plastic was later introduced as a decorative component and, following some experimentation, began being used in functional parts and structural components.
In fact, injection moulding provides the automotive industry with a range of benefits. Here are a few:
Repeatability is essential in this industry. When a brand decides to create a new vehicle, production numbers can rise to hundreds of thousands. To speed up the process, the industry uses injection moulds, allowing for the same high-quality part to be produced quickly, over and over again.
As production numbers rise, costs fall. When parts are developed, scale and cost are both taken into account, and although it’s cheaper to produce a single part using 3D printing, increased production numbers lead to injection moulds becoming more and more advantageous.
Unlike other technologies, injection moulds make it possible to choose from a wide variety of materials, each of which have varying characteristics, such as greater or lesser flexibility or rigidity.
As injection moulds are made from plastic casting, they can be adapted to any shape, ensuring the quality and precision of any part produced and any choice of colour, which can be altered at any time.
Although it is difficult to list the entire range of components produced using injection moulding, it can be said that some are found under the hood of a car (engine cover, liquid and battery tanks), others on the outside (bumpers, headlights, mirrors and grilles) and some inside (steering wheel, dashboard and seat belts).
Rectimold produces high-precision, technical plastic injection moulds for various industries, one of which is the automotive industry. To do so, it relies on a qualified workforce and state-of-the-art machinery. Want to find out more? Contact us.
