Significant development effort has been invested in the reduction/elimination of tailpipe emissions, light-weighting and the general improvement and on-shoring of battery technology, bringing huge gains and new knowledge for car manufacturers and their suppliers. However, the industry must now look toward a NetZero future (manufactured goods and associated services represent 43% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to UK consumption \[Green Alliance\]).
As an industry we must identify how we can reduce and then eliminate the carbon dioxide (CO2) impact during production of vehicles for the transportation sector. As 75% of carbon is locked in at the design phase (based on Gestamp data), we must look to design methodologies, manufacturing processes and materials, energy costs, recoverability, re-use and recyclability to consider the full embedded/embodied carbon (CO2e) cost across a vehicle's lifetime and create a true circular economy for the automotive industry.
**Emissions Reduction via Generative Optimisation (Project ERGO)**
The ERGO Consortium will therefore come together to take the first steps towards aligning business and customer needs with future global automotive carbon legislation/incentives/certification. ERGO will deliver a sustainable design methodology enabling the design of CO2e optimised parts and address the need for sustainable Carbon Fibre (CF).
ERGO will:
* Develop a design methodology facilitating sustainable solutions to automotive light-weighting initiatives.
* Develop novel materials/manufacturing processes compatible with this methodology.
* Practically demonstrate the methodology on prototype automotive components.