SSAB innovates advanced high-strength steels for the automotive industry, providing its Docol® AHSS steels and expert resources to automakers so they can meet their lightweighting and crash performance goals. SSAB supplies a large number of standard grades of Docol® high-strength automotive steels — including AHSS, UHSS and gigapascal strengths — with hundreds of variations to meet specific VDA, SAE, EN, JIS, and OEM standards.
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Safe and lightweight
Achieve better BIW crash performance with strong, optimized AHSS profiles, creating both intrusion-free and energy-absorbing structures.
The strongest steel
Increase car structural durability, toughness, and fatigue resistance with high tensile strength steels – up to 2000 MPa UTS.
Formable
Maximize the designs of your safety components – using complex part geometries – confident that our forming simulations will guide you to high repeatability during production.
Excellent welding
Use conventional welding processes to create strong AHSS joints for improved torsional stiffness and car responsiveness.
Economical and sustainable
Replace costly and CO2-intensive aluminum and carbon-fiber composites with some of the most CO2-efficient AHSS steels available today — and on track to becoming fossil-free, already in 2026.
OEM specific
Customized advanced and ultra-high strength steels for your specific automotive applications.
Fossil-free steel is SSAB’s name for replacing coking coal with green hydrogen for direct reduction ironmaking – combined with minimizing CO2 emissions for the entire value chain, from mine to AHSS delivery. The first fossil-free steel vehicle already exists. And commercial quantities of automotive AHSS/UHSS steels will become available in 2026.
SSAB has entered an agreement with Spain-based Gestamp, a global tier-one automotive supplier of lightweight and safety components, to deliver fossil-free steel for body-in-white and chassis system products.
Martensitic steel combines tensile strengths up to 1700 MPa with good ductility, making it highly efficient for both vehicle lightweighting and improved crash protection — especially in anti-intrusion zones.
Press hardening steels have four major advantages: they can be formed into very complex shapes, their ultimate tensile strength ranges up to 2000 MPa (290 ksi), there is little or no springback, and, with tailored tempering, you can combine “full hard zones” and “soft zones” for multi-function crash performance within a single part.
Complex phase steels have the highest — up to 100% — hole expansion ratios available from advanced high strength steels. Their high HER values provide excellent cold-forming properties for punched and stretched edges/flanges, as well as deep-drawn shapes. CP steels’ superior yield strengths are used for high crash-energy absorption, while their elevated UTS levels enable thinner walls for significant automobile weight reductions.
Dual phase automotive steels have an excellent balance of ductility, high tensile strengths, easy cold formability, and very good crash energy-absorption. Its high early-stage strain hardening (n-value) makes DP steel resistant to local necking due to strain redistribution — providing highly uniform elongation. Dual phase steel’s low yield-to-tensile-strength ratio creates high global formability for deep-drawing and high-stretching capacities — all with good weldability.
High edge ductility HSLA steel with greatly improved local formability and high hole expansion ratios – ideal for challenging auto components with complex designs on sheared stretched edges.
High strength, low alloy steels are a cost-effective choice for increasing strength-to-weight ratios when compared to conventional mild carbon steels. HSLA steels also have excellent bendability and weldability and can increase the strength and/or decrease the weight for a variety of body-in-white and chassis automotive components, including suspensions, beams, and subframes.
Ferritic-Bainitic are multi-phased steels with high hole expansion ratios and good edge stretch capabilities. FB steels are suited for cold-formed and punched flanges when lightweighting automotive components such as wheels, cross members, and other structural parts.
As you strive to provide higher levels of crash protection for passenger compartments – and all-new intrusion-free structures for EV battery packs – Docol® can help. For example, we have stimulated scores of AHSS beam designs to find optimized profiles, delivering 2x better crash performance (energy transfer) than square tubes.
What are your lightweighting goals for a specific automotive safety component? 10% to 20% weight reduction? Creating thinner — and lighter — components using higher strength steels is a major reason for AHSS’s yearly growth in the auto industry.
From concept, to design, simulation, and validation on your production tools, Docol® experts are with you for your development process for AHSS components. We’ll help you determine the most efficient forming layout – including optimized die materials, die construction, and coatings – for high production quality and parts repeatability.
Achieve strong AHSS welds for increased torsional stiffness and fatigue resistance. We designed even our strongest automotive steels to be used with conventional welding processes, including resistance spot welding, arc, and laser. And we’ll aid in your weld simulations, confirming your proposed AHSS joining processes.
Alternatives to automotive advanced high-strength steels include aluminum and fiber-reinforced composites: both are much more expensive and CO2-intensive, requiring specialized knowledge and equipment to form properly. Both are also more difficult to recycle than AHSS steels.
On the other hand, AHSS automotive steels have a long history of successful problem-solving in mass-produced cars, delivering improved impact protection, significant weight savings, and improved vehicle performance.