New Developments in Materials and Fabrication Processes for Automotive Interior Trim Skin Materials

Automotive interiors consist of sandwich type components (e.g., instrument panel, door trim, headliner); hard trim (e.g., pillar trim) and functional solid components (e.g., load floor, seat backs, etc.) The intermaterials competition among new processes for fabricating these 3 types of components were described previously (1)*. This paper examines new developments specifically in the area of skin materials used for the sandwich type interior trim components.