The North American automotive market was dealt a severe blow in the recent recession. With 10.4m units sold in the US and 12.6m in North America altogether, full-year sales fell to a 39-year low in 2009. Even more devastating to the national pride, China overtook the US to become world’s biggest automotive market. In a report ahead of the world’s leading plastics exhibition K 2010 (27 October-3 November), fair organiser Messe Düsseldorf (www.messe-duesseldorf.de) outlines trends in the North American auto market and explores how plastics converters can profit from an upswing.

After the traumatic decline seen in 2009, automotive market research group CSM Worldwide (Northville, Michigan / USA; www.csmauto.com) expects car and truck sales in North America to rebound in the second half of 2010. It projects that US sales will improve 13.5% against 2009 to 11.8m vehicles and by 12.5%, or 14.2m vehicles, in North America altogether. The US will need to increasingly rely on plastics to meet the new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards set by the Obama administration. Washington has tweaked the standard to 7.5 l/km fleet average by year 2016, up from today’s 10.5 l/km, and automaker Ford, for one, is hoping to achieve weight reduction by as much as 350 kg by 2011.

In Canada, the National Research Council Canada is pushing development of lightweight strong composite parts. In partnership with leading OEM supplier Magna International (Aurora, Ontario; www.magnaint.com), the Canadian government is establishing the Magna-NRC Composite Centre of Excellence in the Magna exteriors and interiors facility at Concord, Ontario. The centre will be equipped with modern moulding equipment for thermoplastics composites and will utilise technologies that include direct processing of long-fibre thermoplastics and sheet moulding compounds. This is expected to have the best prospects for reducing the weight of structural car parts.

Mexico, the third largest economy in the NAFTA region, now sees annual sales of an estimated 1m vehicles. The Mexican auto market has close to 40 brands and more than 300 different models of cars, both domestically produced and imported. According to Banco Nacional de Mexico, the industry contributed nearly 4% of the country’s total GDP in 2008 and contributed 16% to manufacturing GDP. Automotive also was the only Mexican industry to see double-digit growth that year. OEM suppliers, which account for 20% of the country’s total manufacturing exports, employ nearly 433,000 people. About 180,000 of these workers are engaged in producing plastics parts, according to an independent estimate.

Plastics industry OEM suppliers stand to benefit from the upswing in the automotive industry. Converters can improve their own economic prospects by serving multiple markets and engaging in multiple activities, experts advise. One example spotlighted by Messe Düsseldorf is integrated mouldmaking and moulding – one company manufacturing both the mould and the part. In this way, the mouldmaking side of the company can benefit from its own processing expertise, while influencing the mouldmaking process and improving efficiency by avoiding excessive re-do cycles.

In blow moulding, the current trend is toward hollow components such as fuel tanks, fluid reservoirs, and curved ducting. To lock in contracts for the part, suppliers must be innovative. In the US, blow moulder Inergy Automotive Systems (Adrian, Michigan; www.inergyautomotive.com), for example, is investing about USD 6m in new equipment for producing multilayer fuel tank and fuel system components.