The use of lightweight materials has been steadily increasing in the automotive industry, and presents new challenges to material joining. Among many joining processes, self-piercing riveting (SPR) is particularly promising for joining lightweight materials (such as aluminum alloys) and dissimilar materials (such as steel to Al, and metal to polymer). However, to establish a process window for optimal joint performance, it often requires a long trial-and-error testing of the SPR process. This is because current state of the art in numerical analysis still cannot effectively resolve the problems of severe material distortion and separation in the SPR simulation. This paper presents a coupled meshfree/finite element with a moving boundary algorithm to overcome these numerical difficulties. The simulation results are compared with physical measurements to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present method.