1. Introduction
In recent years, the global development trend is towards lighter, fuel-efficient cars with greater resistance to
collisions. And the automotive industry is making an effort to reduce the vehicle weight for reducing the CO2
emissions while maintaining high strength properties of vehicle components. And hot stamping technology is key
in this connection. The hot stamping of high strength steels offers the possibility to obtain significant reduction of weight. Steinhoff (2008), Oldenburg (2009) and Karbasian (2010) discussed the hot sheet metal forming of highperformance
steel and its applications in automotive. Thus the applications of hot stamping technology on
automotive structure gain more and more attentions.
Moreover, with growing knowledge and experience comes an increasing interest in how hot stamping
technology can be further developed. Turetta (2006), Naderi (2011) and Shan (2013) studied the formability,
microstructure and mechanical properties of high strength carbon steels after hot stamping. A project formed to
study hot stamping process, the door impact beam for side impact protection was considered to be developed.
Generally, the conventional door impact structure design is composed of one or two tubes and two brackets by cold
stamping parts as shown in Fig. 1. However, there are many advantages if conventional design was changed to hot
stamping design such as costing saving, tooling amount and weight reduction. Thus the development of door
impact beam by hot stamping is illustrated in this paper.