“…The Al-Si coating affects the hardness of the fusion zone (FZ) in the ARW and ARWHS conditions, with lower hardness observed when the Al-Si coating has not been removed prior to welding [12]. The as-received BM hardness in the literature has been measured to be around 250 HV, while the hot-stamped BM (HSBM) hardness has been measured to be around 500-550 HV [8,12,14,15,17,23,[55][56][57][74][75][76][77]. In the as-received condition, both the as-received BM (ARBM) and the ARW samples failed in the BM, since the FZ was fully martensitic in the ARW case [12].…”