Ever-stricter requirements for the protection of vehicle passengers and other road users place conflicting demands on the developers of motor vehicle bodies. On the one hand, a high dimensional stability of the body is required for the passenger protection, and on the other hand, the body is to also be flexible in order to minimize the risk of injury to road users outside of the vehicle in the event of an accident. In addition, these demands are to be fulfilled with a weight of the body, which is as light as possible, so as to be able to also attain a minimization of the fuel consumption at the same time.
Sheet metal workpieces with locally variable thickness, so-called tailored blanks, which are obtained, e.g. by butt welding sheet metal of different thicknesses or by welding or adhering reinforcements to a substrate sheet metal, is a known technology, which is used in an attempt to meet these demands. A weight minimization is possible here in that the wall thickness of the tailored blanks is adapted exactly to the load distribution in the later finished workpiece and in that highly loaded areas receive a high wall thickness and lightly loaded areas receive a small wall thickness.
One disadvantage of this technology is that it requires the production and assembling of various individual parts. In particular, the welding together of the individual parts takes considerable time, because the spots to be welded by a welding tool must be reached and treated one after the other, and because the effort associated with the production and assembling of the individual parts becomes larger, the more exactly the shape and/or number thereof is adapted to the load distribution in the finished workpiece.