**3. Material development tendencies in sheet metal forming with regard to the automotive industry**

In the last 40–45 years, the reduction of fuel consumption led to the intensive development of new materials. These developments resulted in the widespread application of various grades of high strength steels. The origin of these developments can be traced back to the mid-seventieth, when the first micro-alloyed steels arrived to the industrial application. Since then, due to the continuous pressure on material development, several new high strength steel grades appeared and reached already the everyday industrial application. Systematic analysis of these developments can be found in several papers from various authors in the literature [3–7]. In the next sections, a systematic classification of these developments will be summarized.
