Lohr Technologies' EIC Accelerator Hinges: Counting the Results

A car hinge is usually several stamped steel parts, riveted or pinned together after they are made. Lohr technologies GmbH, a precision stamping firm in Heiligenhaus near Düsseldorf, said it could die-cast a working hinge, moving parts included, in one shot. In April 2019 the European Commission picked its INTERLOGS project in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the grant-only forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, and committed an EU contribution of €1,896,680.63 towards a total cost of €2,709,543.75, according to CORDIS. Lohr is the only company named for INTERLOGS in the Commission's list of the 3 April 2019 winners, which gives its website as "www.lohr-technolgies.de", a misspelling of the company's real domain, lohr-technologies.de.

The project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 August 2021. Fourteen months after it ended, at the end of October 2022, the company filed for insolvency, and the Wuppertal district court ordered preliminary proceedings in self-administration on 28 October 2022, according to the law firm GÖRG, whose partner Holger Leichtle was appointed to supervise them, and the trade publisher INDat. The court opened insolvency proceedings on 1 January 2023 on grounds of illiquidity and over-indebtedness, under case number 505 IN 163/22, according to the published court notice.

Where Lohr Technologies Stands Now

The company is in insolvency proceedings. The opening notice of 1 January 2023 is the last court notice listed by insolvenz-radar.de; it names Holger Leichtle as administrator and set a creditors' meeting for 8 March 2023. North Data records a liquidation entry in the commercial register on 10 January 2023 and lists the company as "i. L.", in liquidation. Not every register service agrees: online-handelsregister.de and Implisense still show it as active, with no liquidation recorded. No deletion from the register has been found.

When it filed, the company said operations would continue without interruption, wages were covered for three months by insolvency pay, and a structured search for investors had begun under the consultant Simon Leopold, according to Insolvenz-Portal and INDat. Whether an investor was found, whether the business was sold or whether it closed could not be verified: no announcement of a sale, restructuring plan or closure was found. The company's website still carried its old content in copies archived in January 2025; since the end of February 2025 the domain redirects to a different host behind a bot check, and its content could not be read for this article.

The Technology: Casting the Joint, Not Assembling It

Die casting presses molten metal into a steel mould under high pressure. It is fast and cheap at volume, but it makes rigid parts: anything that moves, such as a hinge, has to be assembled from several pieces afterwards. Lohr's INTERLOGS process casts interlocking parts in one cycle so that the finished part already moves, removing the assembly step, CORDIS says. The company claimed time savings of more than 98%, about 56% less weight, cost savings of up to 60% and four times the stability, and named the automotive market, which it valued at €3.6 billion, as its point of entry.

The project's final report gives the material comparison behind the claims: 100 grams of aluminium per hinge instead of 380 grams of steel, and 10 grams of waste instead of 190. It quotes a weight reduction of 53% per hinge, slightly below the 56% in the project summary, and a production cost reduction of 50 to 60%. The company's own INTERLOGS page in 2020 described a "hybrid lightweight hinge" in plastic and aluminium, said weight fell by "up to 60 percent", and said about 70 INTERLOGS hinges could be made in the five minutes needed to build one conventional hinge. None of these figures has been tested independently in any public source found.

The idea predates the grant. CORDIS lists two patent filings linked to the project, a German application for a "joint unit with permanent lubrication" from March 2015 and a European "hinge" application from December 2017, according to the project's results page; North Data shows further publications in that patent family up to 2023. A 2018 profile of the company by Stefan Mülders says Lohr had worked with the lightweight construction department of the University of Paderborn since 2014.

What INTERLOGS Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 16 July 2019. The stated aims were to scale up the prototype process for commercial use, to demonstrate that it works at large scale and to prepare market entry. The final report says the process was adapted for market entry, the company built up capacity, demonstration parts for several market segments were "designed, simulated, and qualified", potential customers were involved and new markets were examined. It shows pictures of a die-cast tailgate hinge and an injection-moulded INTERLOGS hinge. It names no customer, no production order and no serial application. The deliverables listed on CORDIS are a project website and a sales brochure.

1. Adapt the process for commercial useReportedFinal report says the process was adapted and capacity built up.
2. Demonstration partsDeliveredDie-cast and injection-moulded hinges shown on CORDIS.
3. Large-scale demonstrationUnverifiedNo volume figures published.
4. Market entry with carmakersNot achievedNo customer or series order announced; insolvent in 2022.
5. Growth in turnover and staffNot achievedRevenue fell from 2020, per the insolvency filing.

The project ended on schedule, and CORDIS shows it as closed. On paper it did most of what a two-year scale-up grant can do: the process was moved closer to production and parts were qualified. What it did not produce is evidence that anyone bought the result.

What Happened Between the Grant and the Insolvency

Lohr was not a typical start-up. According to Mülders' 2018 profile, Stefan Lohr, a former interim manager at automotive suppliers, started the business by taking over assets, orders and remaining staff of an insolvent metalworking firm in Heiligenhaus, grew it from about 20 to about 50 employees, and reached the quality status the car industry requires in February 2014. GÖRG described it in 2022 as a tier-one supplier to carmakers with about 60 staff and certifications including the automotive standard TS 16949 and ISO 9001. The founding date differs by source: GÖRG and INDat say 2011, the insolvency notice gives 18 November 2011, the register shows a first entry in February 2012 as LKB Feinstanztechnik GmbH in Waltrop, and the 2018 profile dates the start to about early 2013, when the company took its current name and moved to Heiligenhaus.

During the project the company promoted INTERLOGS at trade fairs, including Doors and Closures in Bad Nauheim in November 2019, according to its archived website. North Data lists two COVID-19 state aid entries of €100,000 each, in September 2020 and February 2021. The insolvency filing gave the reasons: revenue lost in the pandemic from 2020, shortages of key input products, and sharply higher costs for raw materials, energy and logistics, according to GÖRG and INDat. Neither source mentions INTERLOGS.

Filed accounts exist up to 2020, the last of them published in October 2022, according to North Data. Implisense gives a balance sheet total of €16,534,801 for 2020; a second source for that figure, and the equity, result and revenue behind it, could not be found in free register data, so this article does not chart them.

Why Europe Should Care

The INTERLOGS pitch was about keeping manufacturing in Europe: removing an assembly step that is labour-intensive and therefore expensive in high-wage countries. That problem has grown since. When the Commission published its Industrial Action Plan for the automotive sector on 5 March 2025, the suppliers' association CLEPA said the sector faced "the announcement of 54,000 job losses in 2024 alone". One of the plan's pillars is competitiveness and supply chain resilience, aimed at giving the automotive supply chain "de-risked" and lower-cost materials, according to a summary by the industry body Glass for Europe. Lighter parts made with less material and fewer process steps fit those goals, but Lohr's case shows that a process innovation does not shield a small supplier from the cost and demand shocks that hit the whole industry.

The Verdict

Lohr technologies, its administrator and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.