Volvo Lowers Vehicle Fuel Consumption with Super-Light Technology

Equally important to developing more efficient engines and alternative fuels as part of the effort to combat CO2 generation is improvements in the weight of the vehicles. Much of the energy efficiency improvements in engine technology in the last decade have gone into off setting increases in vehicle weight to meet ever more stringent safety standards.  

The Volvo Group’s engineers have created a method for constructing trucks that weigh less while carrying the same payload. Lighter vehicles would entail a significant reduction in fuel consumption and thus carbon dioxide emissions.

To date, lightweight technology has mainly been used in Volvo Aero’s aircraft engine components, but engineers at AB Volvo’s research company, Volvo Technology, foresee favorable opportunities in using similar technology to reduce the weight of the cab and chassis in heavy trucks by at least 20% within ten years.

Carl Fredrik Hartung, Project Manager at Volvo Technology had these remarks;

We are creating the super-light vehicle in a computer environment that simulates how hundreds of thousands of small design alterations can reduce the vehicle’s total weight without affecting other key characteristics in the vehicle, such as crashworthiness or the ability to carry loads.

A lighter vehicle, regardless of whether it is a truck or a bus, can be powered by a smaller engine. If the lighter vehicle is equipped with an engine powered by renewable fuel, or hybrid solutions in which the diesel engine is jointly powered with an electric motor, then fuel consumption and thus carbon emissions can be further reduced.

One of the challenges is that a super-light vehicle needs to be manufactured partly with more expensive materials of higher strength, which means that the vehicle must be produced in volumes that are sufficiently large for the cost to be kept down.

It is important to conduct thorough computer simulations and standardize the manufacturing process so that it will be profitable to manufacture lighter vehicles for commercial use. We have come a long way but a great deal of work remains before the first super-light vehicles hit the road.

A video interview with Carl Fredrik Hartung is available on the Volvo Group´s web site