At the 2024 Center for Automotive Research Seminar, Altair honored the BMW Group with this year’s prestigious Enlighten Award in the Sustainable Process category. This annual accolade celebrates innovative lightweight construction and sustainability solutions that reduce carbon emissions, minimize water and energy consumption, and promote materials reuse and recycling within the global automotive industry.
The BMW Group earned the award for its BMW M Visionary Materials Seat, a research project heralded as a precursor to future product development. The sustainable seat design and its holistic focus on the entire product lifecycle stood out as significant achievements, making it one of the most forward-thinking sustainable developments in the automotive sector.
Collaborative Effort with Industry Partners
The project, led by BMW M GmbH with contributions from BMW Group Designworks, showcased an impressive design, color, and material concept. This achievement was realized in collaboration with several partners: Automotive Management Consulting GmbH, Bcomp Ltd, Gradel Lightweight Sàrl, and Lasso Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH.
Key Themes: Circularity, Lightweight Construction, and Aesthetic Appeal
The award-winning seat focuses on several key themes:
- Design for Circularity: Emphasizing plant-based materials and increasing the share of secondary raw materials to enhance recyclability.
- Lightweight Construction and Aesthetic Appeal: Developing an attractive, high-quality product with a minimalist design that leaves the lightweight seat structure visible.
Intensive lifecycle assessments (LCA) were integrated at each stage of development to ensure sustainability.
Remarkable Reduction in Carbon Footprint
Falco Hollmann, Innovation Manager for Lightweight Design & Sustainability at BMW M GmbH, accepted the award, stating, “We are showing today what will be possible tomorrow with existing technologies and materials to reduce emissions and conserve resources. This is about more than just substituting materials; it is above all about designing for circularity.”
The project demonstrated the effective use of natural materials, including natural fibers, fiber composites, leather alternatives, and algae-based polymers. The BMW M Visionary Materials Seat boasts a CO2e footprint that is 90 percent lower than current BMW M carbon bucket seats, thanks to ultra-light, robotically-wound fiber composite seat support structures and a high recycling rate.
Innovative Manufacturing Processes
The project also pioneered additive manufacturing processes that eliminate support structures, chemical post-treatment, and finishing, resulting in a flatter value creation chain and minimal finishing steps to conserve energy and resources.
Insights for Future Sustainability
Roberto Rossetti, Head of Development Total Vehicle-Lifecycle at the BMW Group, highlighted the importance of balancing and modeling process chains to generate missing primary data. “The data obtained provides new insights, both in terms of today’s negative contributing factors and the design of tomorrow’s processes. This experience provides a solid foundation for continuously improving sustainability and developing innovative solutions for forward-thinking mobility.”
The BMW Group’s recognition at the 2024 Enlighten Awards underscores its commitment to leading the automotive industry toward a more sustainable future.
