Jaguar Land Rover products are going space-age with new materials.
Jaguar Land Rover has been in a bit of a financial pickle recently, but models like the new Land Rover Defender are helping to turn that around. While the British company is working on saving the planet while simultaneously keeping its supercharged V8 alive, it's got other projects on the go too. The most recent is a "pioneering" research trial that JLR is going to use to test new lightweight materials with aerospace technology. The project will be on the go for two years and is hoped to be helpful in reducing the weight of future models. These new metals and composites obviously sound exciting, but they need to be durable too.
In order to test the durability of these new materials, Jaguar Land Rover will be fitting them, presumably, to more than just one prototype, and then taking these vehicles on an arduous journey through various parts of North America in order to determine how they stand up to "some of the world's most extreme physical conditions". The idea is that the data from these tests will then be shared with the product development team back home in the U.K. so that these lightweight materials can be assessed according to JLR's "stringent standards" for quality and longevity. With the Brits having a history of making composites work in new ways, we expect that JLR will make a success of this project.
Matt Walters, the lead engineer on this assignment, says that the test is an example of the JLR brand's "commitment to developing lightweight, durable and robust materials for our future vehicles". Since specialists in composite materials and aerospace technology are a key part of making something like this work, the project will include "world-class partners" who will share their expertise with aluminum manufacturers and even other car makers looking to achieve something similar. With Jaguar Land Rover formerly testing printed structural electronics for car interiors that are claimed to reduce the weight of electronics in the car by as much as 60 percent, it seems that JLR is fully committed to making sure an electric future is not an obese one.
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