What types of clips are used in the automotive industry?

By their design, clips rely on friction, compression, tension or shear interference to make their connections. Given the forces and temperatures involved with automotive applications, typically only friction and edge shear connection styles made of metal or high-density plastic clip materials are acceptable. That leaves us with the most common types of clips used in automotive applications as arrowhead, fir tree, edge bite, pinch, ring, stud-mount and wire retainer clip types. Over the long history of the auto industry, vehicle OEMs have designed thousands of unique clip designs and hundreds of naming conventions, so don’t be surprised if any of these types don’t sound familiar: You might just know them by another name.