Automotive Manufacturing

From white body structural parts and chassis frames to EV battery pack enclosures, LaserPeak fibre laser cutting lines deliver the flatness, edge quality and repeatability that tier-one suppliers need at automotive takt times — with changeovers measured in minutes rather than shifts.

What this sector needs

The challenge

Automotive structural parts are cut from HSLA steel, mild steel and aluminium in batches that shift with every model year, and the takt clock never pauses.

Plasma cutting on 8–20 mm structural plate leaves dross on the top edge and a heat-affected zone up to 3 mm wide. That forces every blank through a re-planing operation before it reaches the welding cell, and re-planing a laser-quality blank is pure scrap.

Punching dies cost tens of thousands of euros per part and tie the supplier to one programme for the entire model cycle, which is why changeovers were routinely outsourced to a die shop with two-week lead times.

EV battery packs add a second constraint. Enclosure side rails in 3–8 mm aluminium-lithium and 700 MPa steel must arrive at the welding cell within ±0.5 mm of nominal, because a visually clean cut that is 0.8 mm out of position still fails the seam.

Skilled laser and CNC operators are the scarcest resource in the plant. Three-shift operation loses two to three days a year per shift to programme setup, and every lost day is paid at full output rate.

The laser answer

LaserPeak's LP-F3000 and LP-F6000 fibre series put a single flat-cutting platform across the whole part mix, from 1 mm aluminium to 25 mm HSLA, and replace the plasma table that dominated structural plate work.

The LP-A Series Automated Loading & Unloading system links the laser to the pallet magazine already in the plant, so the operator loads once and the line runs a mixed-model schedule unattended between batches. A model change becomes a job selection at the control, not a crane intervention.

For battery pack work, the LP-W Series Laser Welding head shares a shuttle table with the cutting cell, so a blank goes from cut to seam without a second handling operation and without a second programming language on the floor.

Every job ships with a process package: cut sequence, gas selection, pierce strategy and support layout are defined per material and thickness, so a new operator running the same programme gets the same edge, the same dross level and the same part.

What customers gain

No more re-planing

A cut edge that arrives flat and square removes a downstream operation entirely. Typical structural-part plants report 40–60% less rework after moving 10–20 mm HSLA from plasma to fibre, and the flatter blank holds its position through assembly without a fixture tweak.

Model changeovers measured in minutes

Replacing fixed punch dies with on-demand programmes turns a two-week die-shop lead time into a change at the control. One-line takt on mixed-model schedules typically improves by 20–45% once the laser is no longer waiting for a die to be re-ground.

One cell for blanks and seams

Sharing a shuttle table between the cutting head and the LP-W welding head removes a transfer step and a whole class of handling damage. The same programme geometry follows the part from cut to seam, which is what makes ±0.5 mm seam tracking on battery rails realistic.

Output per operator, not operators per machine

With automated loading and pallet magazines, one operator supervises two or three machines instead of standing at each. Plants report 25–40% fewer direct hours per part, and the released capacity goes into in-house subassembly instead of being sold back as overtime.