TRAVERSE CITY, MI – Altair, a Troy, MI-based engineering company that specializes in weight optimization, presented its second annual Enlighten Award at the Management Briefing Seminars here to Jaguar Land Rover.
The award is for the development and implementation of its premium lightweight architecture design concept on the latest Range Rover vehicles.
The Enlighten Award is the automotive industry’s first award program created specifically to acknowledge innovations in vehicle lightweighting and is intended to honor the greatest achievements in weight savings each year, says David Mason, vice president-Global Automotive for Altair.
“Their holistic approach to lightweighting and carbon-dioxide reduction has yielded an aggressive and highly impressive methodology that is enabling the creation of new and exciting vehicle architectures,” Mason says.
The new Range Rover body-in-white weighs 658 lbs. (288 kg) compared with the previous model BIW weight of 1,096 lbs. (498 kg), a reduction of more than 40%. Significant savings also were achieved for the chassis and powertrain.
JLR developed new computer-aided engineering techniques to simulate crash, durability and noise, vibration and harshness attributes, Mason says, as well as new manufacturing-simulation techniques for stamping, casting and joining the lightweight vehicle structures.
