Recent Materials for Weight Reduction of Gasoline Engines

Weight reduction is a key technology in order to improve fuel economy and driving performance of automobiles. Recently, requests for the automobile has been diversified, which are upper-class oriented taste, improvement of safety, noise attenuation and earth environmental problem etc. These requests cause increase of weight of the automobile. Accordingly, the material technology to reduce weight becomes more and more important. Furthermore, due to tightening CAFE regulation in the US and the Clean Air Act in California in 1990, it is forced to speed up the development of weight reduction technology. In this paper, recent materials for weight reduction of gasoline engines are described.