Trends to assisted and autonomous driving combined with electric vehicles result in new requirements for automotive glazing: The exterior glazing has to be light-weight and needs to incorporate new functionalities, like head-up displays, coatings for heating and solar-control, switchable films or camera windows. Furthermore, sunroofs are becoming very popular and are asking for the best optical edge finish.
In the interior displays are integrated to show information or entertainment content and personalize the vehicle. Those thin glasses are permanently gaining in size and complexity and require high accuracies and often special shapes.
As a result, automotive and display glass processing is undergoing tremendous changes now. The requirements on the machinery and manufacturing processes are constantly increasing: Thinner glass, new glass types, like alumina-silicate- or boro-silicate-glass, larger parts, better edge quality, higher shape precision, less distortion and new interlayers are major drivers for complexity in the manufacturing processes.
Technologies and processing strategies need to be adapted to produce these parts efficiently and conforming to their challenging specifications. This paper will give an overview of state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies and processes suited for the automotive and display glasses and of the future.