Decorative Tailpipes Development Case for Honda

In 2012, as people's demands for automotive exterior aesthetics continued to rise, new design concepts emerged for the decorative parts at the end of automotive exhaust pipes—two exhaust decorative tailpipes of various styles were added to the rear bumper. Driven by aesthetic design needs, the decorative tailpipes were designed into diverse styles, such as quadrilateral, double-hole square, and diamond-shaped. These styles imposed extremely high requirements on sheet metal stretching of thin-plate materials; material cracking and wrinkling were common issues, posing a technical challenge, and the surface polishing also required certain technical expertise. Based on these technical characteristics, Hexin proposed a solution: formulating processing technologies through CAE analysis of shape-related difficulties, and leveraging its capability of independently developing molds. Hexin gained the customer's recognition for its cost and technical advantages, and was finally designated as the supplier.

The project was initiated in June of the same year to start the development of rear bumper decorative tailpipes. After a series of work including mold design and manufacturing, manufacturability verification of the designed parts, and verification of quality, production capacity, performance and other aspects at various stages, the project successfully passed the safety declaration for the new vehicle's mass production launch in 2013 and obtained mass production approval.

During the development process, effective mold design was achieved through process simulation and analysis, breaking through the technical bottleneck of defects like cracking and wrinkling, and increasing the qualification rate to 99.7%. By independently developing automatic polishing equipment and assembly robot workstations, Hexin effectively reduced workers' labor intensity and ensured the stability of product quality, thereby realizing cost reduction.

Our decorative tailpipes are applied to major Honda models, including Crosstour, UR-V, Avancier, Accord, Odyssey, Inspire, CR-V, Civic, Crider, Fit, City, Vezel, and Breeze.

* Design and manufacturing of tooling and gauges;

* Design, development and manufacturing of special equipment for production capacity improvement;

* Various product performance testing and verification (including welding sensitization testing, welding strength testing, corrosion resistance testing, air tightness testing, material physical property testing, product precision section testing, etc.);

* Implementation of various PPAP requirements, etc.

Through the improvement of automation, the per capita efficiency of polishing and assembly was increased by 50%; meanwhile, the rational layout of materials improved material utilization by 15%, and the overall procurement BOM cost was reduced by 25%.