Many different materials are currently used to manufacture automobile chassis. For mass-produced vehicles, steel and aluminium pressings are most commonly employed; while for limited-production vehicles, such as racing cars, sandwich panels using hexagonal-cell honeycomb materials are used as a core in lightweight, adhesively bonded sandwich structures. But all of the major chassis-manufacturing materials presently used - be they carbon fibre, extrusions, tubular frames, aluminium pressings or steel pressings - have their own limitations. Typically, the high-volume manufacturing processes require a very high investment in capital equipment, while the low-volume processes cannot cost-effectively be scaled up for high production runs.
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