SPIRAL

The Challenge

The government’s carbon emission regulations have gained immense emphasis from automobile manufacturers. Manufacturers are prioritising making lightweight cars, as it is directly associated with reducing a car’s carbon emission in its overall lifetime. This unintentionally results in EV brands using lightweight materials with poor recyclability. Such biased decisions within different sustainability targets like carbon zero goals, recyclability, ethical sourcing etc., create environmentally harmful causal loops, often uncovered during the design phase. Attaining the desired circularity while balancing other sustainability targets is a challenge.

In exploring the designers' decision-making journey, we identified four main blockers to making sustainable material decisions:

[1] Lack of visibility on all the sustainable alternatives available in the market (decisions are made based on their knowledge and experience).

[2] Lack of awareness of new material in the market (happens only when suppliers reach out to the manufacturer with a new material proposal).

[3] Complexities in prioritising and balancing requirements on physical properties and sustainability targets (Key problem).

[4] Lack of coordination between internal teams results in increased material diversity and causal loop consequences.

Our Service

Spiral is an AI-based service that helps EV manufacturers to prioritise different sustainability targets and make circular material decisions during the automobile design and concept development phase. The AI-powered plugin integrates with existing design and engineering software to ensure sustainable material decisions through the three service components:

[1] Analysis & Prioritisation- Analyses to balance different material property requirements and sustainability targets and highlight opportunities for material replacement.

[2] Awareness of alternatives- Providing visibility and bespoke suggestions on all the available materials and their details, circularity metrics, and contribution to the overall impact.

[3] Internal Collaboration- Facilitating alignment between different internal teams to make collective material decisions.

Validation and Impact

We validated our service structure and components with several industry experts and all the stakeholders involved and used the feedback to iterate further and refine the service.

“In principle, I think it's a really good concept. I know that we're trying to establish something similar, which is like a material calculator, which would show the CO2 footprints and also, we want to add kind of the recyclability of the materials into that list so that when you choose a material or designer chooses, they can see like is this recyclable material or not” - Head of Circular at an EV manufacturing brand.

The automotive industry is a complex system of various stakeholders with different requirements and needs. Spiral connects them, creating multi-sided benefits, and eliminating barriers within the ecosystem. Spiral can potentially create a broader impact on businesses and the planet. It brings out the business value of sustainability by broadening the scope for making cost-effective and sustainable decisions, as well as facilitating sustainable and responsible production.