 Corus plays an important role in helping the automotive industry exploit the advantages of metals in car design and engineering. This goes beyond continuous development of new materials and involves working closely with designers and engineers in the automotive industry by offering customer technical support and consultancy services. Structural product performance Material properties have a strong influence on the mechanical performance of automotive constructions. Understanding this influence and making this knowledge available to the designers and engineers of our customers is essential to ensure they get the support they need to design the best products and applications possible. In order to achieve this, a full range of computer aided engineering capabilities for design & engineering, structural optimisation, structural evaluation, crashworthiness evaluation and durability assessment is available. This enables us to evaluate the influence of material properties on the in-service properties of automotive components and to assess the results of improved material descriptions. Experimental facilities to characterise materials and components with respect to strength and stiffness, fatigue strength, high speed impact properties and dent resistance help us assess new steel grades and aluminium alloys in terms of their in-service performance. They also provide us with the experimental data to verify the Finite Element-calculations. Design & engineering support Corus is involved in the concept, design and engineering stages of the vehicle development process, giving support to new vehicle programmes. This work is the focus of the Corus Automotive Sector Unit (ASU) based in Coventry. Here a team of design and engineering specialists with considerable experience in the automotive industry is employed. | 
