SLUSH SKINS FOR DASHBOARDS AND CAR DOOR PANELS
CARING FOR DETAILS
The skin coating a car’s interiors, such as the dashboard, console cover and inside door panels, is an important factor affecting first impact when getting into a car. As a matter of fact , car trim skins can immediately convey a pleasant feeling of comfort, luxury and confidence or, reversely, can create an impression of toughness and sobriety as is the case of sportscars. Whatever the case, skins coatings are the result of very precise choices of materials, technologies and processes aimed at obtaining the desired effect.
ILPEASKIN®,
is the company’s division that manufactures moulded slush skins. It relies on three production sites located in Italy, Poland and Brazil , and it directly supplies car makers, such as VOLKSWAGEN and FIAT, or their tear-one suppliers, as in the case of Faurecia, Visteon and Johnson Controls.
The skins are made in very modern Ilpea’s slush moulding facilities using compounds that are either developed and produced by Ilpea or sourced from outside companies.
Ilpea is constantly searching for new materials and processes to enhance the finishing characteristics of its skins and, at the same time,to obtimize production costs, increasingly reduce the impact on the environment and make recycling easier. As part of its policy for reducing costs and promoting recycling, Ilpea makes skins with a controlled degree of gloss that do not require any surface painting and two-colour skins obtained from pre-coloured PVC powders (patent protection extended to all countries), as well as developing skins made from new materials, such as TPO, TPU and polyesters.
The technology that, starting from PVC, TPO and TPU foams, uses a double-cast slush moulding process to make two-layer skins (one layer is foamed, the other is not) with a rigid support directly built onto the foamed layer, was developed to optimize costs and improve technical characteristics.
Weight reduction and recycling easiness (protected by 12 international patents) are some of the main advantages that were made possible. AUDI, VW, SKODA, SEAT, PEUGEOT, RENAULT, FORD and the FIAT Group, all use ILPEA skins on various cars models in their production.