Car component supplier ElringKlinger (Dettingen / Germany; www.elringklinger.de) has received an order from Chinese start-up Byton for lightweight vehicle parts. The order will run for a period of six years and is in the range of "two-digit million euros". The future Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer has placed the order for cockpit cross-members of a plastic/metal hybrid material destined for a premium SUV. The cross-members are being developed in Germany and the US, and are expected to be manufactured at the company's plant in Suzhou, Jiangsu / China from 2019.

This is the second order for lightweight cockpit cross-members, said ElringKlinger CEO, Stefan Wolf. An innovative process is used for their production that combines metal hydroforming with plastics injection moulding in one process step. The result, says the company, is a complex geometry with minimum tolerances, considerable structural strength in the event of a crash and major weight advantages. ElringKlinger has been involved in the series production of similar structural components of plastic/metal hybrids since 2015 in Leamington, Ontario / Canada and Suzhou, and since mid-2017, in Fremont, California / USA.

Byton is regarded as one of the rising stars on the electric vehicle scene, although there is still scepticism among traditional market players as to whether the concept of the smartphone on wheels will really work. Recently, at the "International Auto Show" in Las Vegas, company founder Carsten Breitfeld showed a first SUV study with a dashboard consisting primarily of a 1.25 m screen that can be controlled by voice, gesture or touch.
Apart from the two founders, Breitfeld and Daniel Kirchert, the Byton brand belongs to the Future Mobility Company (FMC), which also brings together a number of other managers who contribute their expertise from Tesla, BMW and Google. The vehicles are to be built in Nanjing, Jiangsu / China with a capacity of 300,000 cars in 2020. The cars will definitely be pegged for export to Europe.