Honda SUSTAINA-C concept makes vehicle production sustainable

Honda’s SUSTAINA-C Concept shows how cars could be produced in a sustainable manner, with acrylic resin that is recycled and reused. This kind of resource circulation, not constrained by finite resource, will overcome the constraints of the limited availability of resources, and achieve environmental sustainability to allow mobility as we know it long into the future.

Mobility products are made from a variety of materials, including metals, resins and fabrics. However, these materials and resources are limited. If only current ways of making products and recycling are maintained, there will, sooner or later, come a time when it will become difficult to sustain our production of mobility products

Re-using acrylic resin
The concept model developed by Honda has brightly coloured vehicle body panels made of acrylic resin materials recovered after previous use. Because acrylic resin has excellent weather resistance and surface smoothness, as well as outstanding colouring properties and transparency, it is possible to ensure high design quality without the need for coating, so acrylic resin has been used for automobile taillights and other parts before.

In dealing with used acrylic resin, however, the technical difficulties in ensuring sorted collection and appropriate recycling meant that only the thermal energy generated in incineration has hitherto been recovered and used. Also, a weakness of acrylic resin that it could easily crack when impact is applied has made its widespread use in vehicle body panels difficult.

Using advanced recycling technologies
Through its joint development project with Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, Honda has succeeded in turning the acrylic materials collected from used products into recycled materials with the performance and quality levels equivalent to those of new materials, by applying advanced recycling technologies.

By also establishing the horizontal recycling technology for consistently manufacturing products of the same type and developing new acrylic resin materials that achieve both high-level impact resistance and moldability, Honda has kept up its activities to overcome conventional weaknesses of acrylic materials.

Enhancing design quality
The SUSTAINA-C team also worked on promoting the designs that capitalize on the properties of acrylic resin with no coating necessary. The use of the body colours with excellent chroma saturation, by drawing on the excellent surface smoothness and colouring properties of acrylic resin, and the effective placing of fluorescent acrylic materials with high transparency, would help enhance the design quality.

The resin streaks generated in body panel molding processes are used also to express marble patterns, as a part of the endeavours to further pursue the design characteristics distinctive of acrylic resin.

Tailgate as a screen
By capitalizing on the excellent transparency that is a characteristic of acrylic resin, the tailgate has been formed as one panel, like a smartphone screen, leading to the adoption of a screen-like tailgate, with the light of the tail lamps, etc., being transmitted from the rear.

Mini LED display lights are used for the tail lamp light being transmitted from the rear end  of the acrylic material. The display lights are used not only for the lamp lighting function but also for showing the state of charge while parking and communicating with other vehicles nearby, through various imagery expressions and text messages, thus presenting an expanded possibility of how vehicles could be used in a new way.

Establishing these technologies shown in the SUSTAINA-C makes it possible to considerably reduce the CO₂ emissions generated through body painting processes and promoting resource circulation. This will help Honda to continue moving forward towards achieving its ‘Triple Action to ZERO’’ goal by 2050.

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