COMMENT: Rapid prototyping to play key role in reducing emissions

Automotive manufacturers are finding themselves under growing pressure to make their vehicles as green as possible. With both the UK and French governments recently announcing their intent to phase out pure gasoline and diesel light vehicles by 2040, the industry is currently preparing to deal with increasingly stringent regulations and measures aimed at further reducing emissions.

One of the most effective ways of increasing a vehicle’s efficiency is to reduce its weight. Rather than attempting to reduce the weight of the overall vehicle in a significant way, however, it’s far more practical to break down the process into a series of small steps, and reduce the weight of one individual component at a time. By shaving just fractions of a gram from a component’s weight, automotive manufacturers are able to take a small but important step to cut down emissions, even if by a matter of degrees.