All-aluminium electric car by Tata Technologies and China’s NIO
Tata Technologies revealed its collaboration with NIO China, a new-generation electric car company, for the complete product development process of NIO’s range of all-aluminium electric car.
The association between the two companies commenced with the collaborative engineering for NIO’s first electric, all-aluminium electric car, the ES8. NIO plans the ES8 to be its first product for the Chinese EV market, which is the largest in the world.
Talking about this association, Warren Harris, managing director & CEO of Tata Technologies, said,“Our close working relationship in the areas of lightweighting, connected vehicles and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a great example of the type of partnerships that will define the future automotive ecosystem. We look forward to our partnership with NIO developing at scale.”
Commenting on Tata Technologies’s contribution, Roger Malkusson, vice-president, Vehicle Engineering for NIO, said, “They were able to pool in experts and teams from China, India, UK and Romania to work together with the NIO engineering team to deliver the final product which adhered to the highest standards in safety and finesse.”
The two companies initiated their association in mid-2015, when NIO was close to being incepted as an ambitious next-gen EV startup. Since then, Tata Technologies has engaged with NIO to drive major engineering aspects related to the development of ES8, such as body structures, closures and exteriors, advanced manufacturing engineering, PLM and off-car connectivity.
Tata Technologies, in this strategic association with NIO, utilised its globally distributed execution model and extended its proven expertise in out-of-the-box engineering processes.
With the goal of creating a product-development process that would establish an industry benchmark, NIO and Tata Technologies have worked on a range of concepts on weight optimisation using advanced materials. The team has worked on creating a process that would lead the way for more advanced material based vehicles in China. The result of implementing such expertise is that the ES8 is currently achieving body weight efficiency targets that are better than the EuroCarBody Conference.
The association has also achieved significant technological milestones in the PLM domain. The team successfully led and implemented the 3DEXPERIENCE 2016x (Dassault Systemes) solution. It was delivered by Tata Technologies’ global talent and is another first in the next-gen EV OEM landscape, enabling engineers to accelerate the product development lifecycle through concurrent engineering.
The all-aluminium electric car and connected car industries are on the cusp of making intelligent transportation dreams a reality. While there has been a global increase in the demand of technologically-enhanced electric vehicle components like embedded infotainment systems, intelligent transportation systems, etc., the South and East Asia markets are the best bet for the development and manufacturing of smart cars.
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