Traditional requirements in automotive industry are pushing to new concepts in underhoodcomponents. The incremental improvements are not enough for achieving the cost reduction, whichis mandatory to maintain competitiveness. Usually the business model chosen by the industry isbased on one technology and tries to get the excellence in this technology; according to this modelthere is stamping, foundry, plastic, forging or aluminium groups. Obviously the business modelconstraints totally the design lines and often industries try to offer to the market solutions in onetechnology, even when this is not the best for the customer, but is the unique possibility based onthe production facilities.The aim of this document is to explain how to get the best solution without any initial constraintdue to a mono-technology business model strategy. As final result we explain an underhoodcomponent design, which must offer the higher added value, minimum cost and product andprocess quality insurance.A combination of different materials and processes implies several difficulties and opens issues inthe development and validation of one component. Some of those issues will be analyzed in thispaper.First of all we have to clarify that the solution for innovative design is not to use a new highstrength plastic material to fulfil our requirements. Probably these components need a very specificmaterial and with cost not in the range of a common plastic.Polymeric materials, which are able to substitute metals, must be used as a tool and, by sure, withvery interesting possible applications. Designers shouldn’t considered them as a direct solution, butrather they have to think about functions (customer expectations), how we are going to guaranteethose functions and how we can add more functionality to our component, with a polymericmaterial or not, which finally means value for the customer. For each function we have materialsand processes which are more appropriate to fulfil them. Aligned with this, a multi-material/multi-technologysolution should cover the maximum number of functions with success.
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