AOC’s SMC Solution for Ford Branco's Removable Roof

In April 2024, the domestic version of the world-class SUV Ford Branco was officially launched at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition. The model perfectly replicates the wildness and practicality of the early generation of Ford Branco in 1966, while the innovative design with easily removable doors and roof brings a refreshing experience to consumers. AOC’s A-class specialty resin Palapreg ®P18-03 was applied to the removable roof panels of the Ford Branco, which fully embodies the advantages of composite materials.

Changes of Automobile Industry

With the development of the automotive industry, the intelligentization, automation, digitalization in car parts manufacturing have been featured in more than a hundred kinds of car body assembly parts. With the increasing complexity of the parts, the process is more and more complicated, and the degree of cooperation is increasingly demanding.

Finding a more suitable way to optimize the process in a limited cost and scale, and at the same time bringing cost reduction and more gain, lean management, and efficiency improvement through technological change, thus generating more effective value, is an important part of the process control management and design that many automobile factories need to consider.

Composites Brings Diversity

Compared to traditional metal, SMC composite for four doors and two covers as well as roofs and other automotive parts provides designers with more flexible and complex structure and modeling design, besides its lighter weight. Parts assembly asks for higher requirements on dimensional stability and deformation, and it’s far less likely to apply plastic in the exterior parts than to apply composite. That’s because weather resistance is also one of the advantages of the composite. More individualized demand limits the amount of target market for a single vehicle model, and when the input-output ratio of the tooling exceeds the budget, SMC can significantly reduce the upfront cost burden.

The Advantage of AOC’s SMC Solution

In addition, the requirements of OEMs for off-road vehicle roofs have also fully verified and demonstrated the advantages of composite automotive parts made of AOC's SMC resin:

The large size ,tests the material stability in the body assembly;
Weather resistance, compared with thermoplastic materials, smc is better in weather resistance and corrosion resistance；
For exterior parts, SMC is the lowest cost and best appearance quality process material of glass fiber composites.；
Detachable，The composite is lighter than the metal, and the top cover can be disassembled by hand;
Low cost, the advantages of the integrated design reflected in composite materials. Compared with metal materials, mold cost is lower, the amortized cost is significantly reduced, providing better opportunity for the planning layout of the OEMs.

Joint Hands for Co-development
SMC solution with AOC's A-class surface system have been maturely and quantitatively used in the passenger cars with four doors and two covers. The more typical production models are Volvo‘s tailgate panels, Jeep Wrangler's removable roof, all the exterior trim parts of Corvettes C-series, and so on.
With deep industry accumulation and forward-looking technical vision, AOC provides strong data and program support for SMC composites for auto parts manufacturing enterprises. Through the strong combination of the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and sharing the first-line experience interchangeably between the domestic composite production and molding manufacturers and European and American companies, we have made our automotive parts more intelligent and diversified, which lends a hand to the composite enterprises, and helps to achieve the common development of the automotive industry.

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