What materials will be used to build electric cars in the future?

Which materials and construction techniques will be used in electric mobility in the future will depend on vehicle specific requirements (vehicle size and design, motorization and configuration, price level) and the development potential of the materials.

The strategy, which has been primarily pursued until now was to simply replace heavier materials with lighter ones when it came to exploiting the potential of lightweight construction but this approach is reaching its economic and technical limitations. Here, the development of multi-material constructed lightweight construction offers an optimal compromise in terms of cost and technical considerations. Materials forged using multi-material systems compensate deficits of a material by combining it with other materials. This leads to new structural and functional properties, which could not be provided by any of the individual materials. Since future electric vehicles will initially be manufactured in small numbers (30,000–50,000 units/year), well-known lightweight materials can be used alongside new material combinations as well as high-performance composite materials.