Smart driving cars have a strong demand for automotive plastics

Driven by various groups, smart driving cars have become a hot topic in automotive market research!

In the next five years (2019-2023), the compound growth rate of China's intelligent driving industry market size will be about 20.62%, and it is expected to reach RMB 238.1 billion by 2023. This shows the role of intelligent driving cars in promoting the automobile market and even the national economy.

Smart driving car is a comprehensive system that integrates environmental perception, planning and decision-making, multi-level assisted driving and other functions. It uses computers, modern sensors, information fusion, communications, artificial intelligence and automatic control technologies, and is a typical high-tech complex. The main factors affecting smart cars include driving safety and communication efficiency, while the factors that affect car driving mainly include driving environment, car itself and human problems.

At present, the research in this field mainly focuses on improving the safety and comfort of automobiles and providing excellent human-machine interaction systems. From the perspective of development needs, especially the first two areas, there is a strong demand for automotive plastics.

Huge demand for automotive electronic equipment

Today's cars tend to have increasingly rich active safety configurations. Active safety configurations are configurations that allow the vehicle to actively intervene and avoid accidents in the event of misoperation caused by human error.

The active safety configuration of a car includes electronic stability system, warning system, ABS (anti-lock braking system), EBD (electronic brake-force distribution device), etc. They are configurations that remind or assist the driver to drive the vehicle safely before an accident occurs.

It is understood that with the development of ADAS advanced driver assistance systems, there is a huge demand for automotive electronic equipment configuration, and the demand will increase by nearly 30%!

Compared with general-purpose plastics, engineering plastics can meet higher requirements in terms of mechanical properties, durability, corrosion resistance, heat resistance, etc. These aspects are issues that automotive electronic supporting equipment pays more attention to. Therefore, there is no doubt that the increase in demand for automotive electronic equipment will promote the development of engineering plastics.

Car interior design upgrade

In recent years, car interiors have been developing rapidly and the utilization rate of automotive plastics has also increased. However, as interior design has begun to weaken, the emergence of smart cars has provided a solution to this problem.

According to the classification of the US SAE, future high-level L4/L5 smart driving cars will be able to eliminate the steering wheel. After the steering wheel is eliminated, the driving position will be loosened and become flexible and changeable, which allows greater freedom in interior design.

In the case that the size of the car will not be significantly upgraded for the time being, once the interior layout is to usher in multiple modes, a large amount of automotive plastics will be needed to support it. The flexible and changeable shaping capabilities of plastic parts will be relied upon to exchange for more space. In addition, the excellent lightweight performance of plastics can also avoid the problem of increasing the weight of the vehicle, which is also directly helpful in ensuring sufficient cruising range.

In addition, innovation in interior design will inevitably promote the development of plastic molding technology and environmental protection technology.

In the future, as national policies and regulations related to intelligent driving gradually take shape, industry technologies continue to improve, and Chinese intelligent driving companies actively promote the implementation of applications, the scale of China's intelligent driving market will continue to expand. As an important part of this, automotive plastics will play a very important role in this due to their excellent properties.