July/August_AMP_Digital

A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 1 8 1 8 *Member of ASM International AUTOMOTIVE ALUMINUM—PART II THE GREAT AMERICAN AWAKENING: THE OIL CRISIS When the Big Three automakers started thinking about replacing steel sheet with aluminum, they found an industry vastly different from the Alcoa-dominated world of the pre-war era. Laurent Chappuis,* Light Metal Consultants LLC, Grosse Ile, Mich. Robert Sanders,* Novelis Inc., Atlanta I f the period before WorldWar II was the automobile industry’s childhood, then the 20 years that followed the war were its adolescence: self-confident, self-cen- tered, exuberant, and a little mad. Cars grew fins and sported fancy two-tone paint jobs overflowing with chrome. They got bigger, more powerful, and added all kinds of new features to entice customers such as automatic transmissions, air con- ditioning, power steering, power brakes, powerwindows,foldinganddisappearing roofs, and more. It worked. Car sales grew almost threefold between 1947 and 1965. President Dwight D. Eisenhower started the interstate highway system during his first term and a whole new way of life developed around automo- biles. People used their cars to commute from new homes in the sub- urbs. But the industry was changing: The Big Three automakers used their large produc- tion numbers to amortize fast model changeovers. Smaller companies strug- gled to keep up, consolidated, and eventually disappeared. The coach buil- ders of the pre-war era survived for a time, but they too were fading. Dark Fig. 1 — U.S. total passenger car sales, 1947-1973. Nobu McCarthy poses with a Datsun from Japan at the 1958 Imported Car Show in Los Angeles. Courtesy of USC Libraries, Los Angeles Examiner Photo- graphs Collection, 1920-1961.