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The crushing of crash boxes is a complex phenomenon characterized by a strong interaction of structural and material properties. Many attempts to improve their energy absorption by adopting one aspect resulted in unacceptable unprogressive bucking. Thus, special considerations are required for crash box optimization including both material and structural effects. In this study, the structural behavior of the crash box is analyzed and a new design approach is introduced to fulfill these requirements. Currently, components, processes, and materials are mainly developed independently. However, to exploit the full potential of modern materials in component design, integrative development work is necessary. Component performance-based requirements and corresponding local material properties must be taken into account concurrently. In this work, a component-driven material design approach is presented, in which local-material-property requirements are derived from component simulations. This new approach is demonstrated by the use case of a quasistatically deformed crash box produced out of steel DP600 for the optimization target “energy absorption”. The finite element simulations were carried out on the crash box, and required material properties for improving the crash box performance were derived based on the simulations. Heat treatment strategies were developed afterwards and experimentally validated to fulfill these requirements. The finite element (FE) simulations based on the experimentally extracted material properties reveal the potential of the component-driven material design approach to improve the crash box performance. The introduced approach enables exploiting the full energy-absorption capacity of the material while ensuring the desired service behavior of the component.