Lightweight design for Tesla

One of KAMAX’s fastest growing customers over the last couple of years has been Tesla. We are their primary fastener supplier in chassis and suspension applications for the Model 3 and Model Y. The engineering teams at Tesla have shown great interest in our innovation of lightweight designs. Both teams worked together to incorporate KAMAX’s design into Tesla’s standard. Any new part, if it’s a candidate for lightweight head, has been designed with this feature. One ongoing project is converting current parts we were awarded in 2017 for the Model 3 to lightweight design. Many of the same parts were carried over to the Model Y. Once fully implemented, this will save approximately 500 grams per vehicle. These parts will eventually be used globally and need to be produced by all KAMAX regions as Tesla China and Tesla Berlin continue to ramp up.

Innovation Hub tries new approaches

Strong changes are coming to our KAMAX product portfolio driven by the changing market demands. The fasteners typically used in today’s combustion engines will fade out in the future and new demands for solutions and products will arise, for example, from e-mobility or fuel cell technology. In June 2020 the Innovation Hub was established within KAMAX Technology. The role of this small department can be described in two main tasks: first, the creation and collection of ideas for new products and processes and second, the development promising ideas into next development phase resulting in a PoC (Proof of Concept).

The most important part of the process creating valuable ideas is to generate ideas at all. The more ideas we add to our process, the higher the chance that a valuable idea is among them. Therefore, we encourage all KAMAX employees to have an open mind and reach us whenever they have an idea and participate in this challenging journey. All new product ideas are collected into a database and its potential and feasibility will be studied. When one of them is considered “valuable”, the Innovation Hub will put together a team that will be in charge of taking this idea to the next level so that the concept is ready for further development in the TEC departments. In its short live Innovation Hub has until today registered more than 200 development ideas and worked out 32 feasibility studies and finished 2 proof of concepts studies. As an example the analysis and identification of future products, resulting from the emerging hydrogen-economy, may be mentioned. In this project not only products in the field of hydrogen driven vehicles (fuel cells) were analyzed, but also non-automotive applications in the area of the production or distribution of hydrogen or energy production by stationary fuel cells were evaluated.

The development teams are formed specifically for each project, making sure that the team is cross-functional and interdisciplinary, combining all the competencies needed for the project. This means that every KAMAX employee can and should have the opportunity to be involved in the ideation and innovation process. By this, you have the chance to actively work on your idea, built functional prototypes and have fun testing it. The team should focus their workload on this project during the time of its development, which typically will last a couple of weeks or a few months.

You are interested in what ideas we are working on or have your own good idea? You want to learn about our work methodology? We are looking forward hearing from you: innovationhub@kamax.com

If you want to learn more about the methods of product and process development within our Technology department, you can find a detailed article here (note: only available in English).