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 9 clouds were appearing on the horizon and the industry would face a serious crisis that suddenly opened the door for a return to aluminum sheet in the auto- motive world. The first pressure point came from the growing number of imports. Not ev- ery American liked big cars and an in- creasing number of buyers were opting for smaller and more efficient imports, first from Europe but increasingly from Japan. From a modest start in 1949, Volkswagen was selling enough Beetles by 1955 to officially set up a U.S. sales operation. In January 1958, Califor- nians got their first look at a Toyota and a Datsun at the Imported Car Show in Los Angeles. Yearly imports passed the half-million mark by 1960 and the mil- lion mark by 1968 (Fig. 1). Second, the increasing number of cars that grew heavier and thirstier only added to the accumulated pollution created by America’s powerful indus- trial base. In congested areas, air pol- lution had become a serious problem and the government began to legislate solutions. The modest 1955 Air Pollu- tion Control Act came first, followed by the Clean Air Act of 1963, and finally the 1965 Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act. By the 1968 model year, cars would need to start meeting increasingly strin- gent emission standards. Mandatory safety standards were now appearing as well. All of this meant that heavier cars would get even heavier at the same time as engines were being strangled by the early emission control systems. Indeed, the curb weight of a stan- dard class car would grow by almost 1000 lb between 1958 and 1973, despite the adoption of an increasing number of weight saving strategies (Fig. 2). Third, as the car population soared, oil consumption grew propor- tionally. Domestic oil production could not keep up. By the 1960s, the U.S. be- gan a dependence on imported oil that grew dramatically after production started to decline past 1970 (Fig. 3), al- though U.S. crude oil production has recently rebounded due to shale oil. In October 1973, Arab nations who were members of the Organization of the Pe- troleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) agreed to use oil to influence U.S. sup- port for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. They enacted an oil embargo that caused severe shortages at the pump for U.S. motorists. The Big Three were in a vulnerable position with little to of- fer to an American public that suddenly demanded fuel efficiency. When Presi- dent Gerald Ford signed the Energy Pol- icy and Conservation Act in December 1975, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) was a household name and fuel efficiency was now regulated. ALUMINUM INDUSTRY EVOLVES When the Big Three started think- ing about replacing steel sheet with aluminum, they found an industry vast- ly different from the Al- coa-dominated world of the pre-war era. WWII had required an all-out indus- trial commitment to war production. To that end, Congress had established the Defense Plant Corpora- tion (DPC) in August 1940 and tasked it with expand- ing production capabilities. When aluminum produc- tion peaked at 835,000 tons in 1943, DPC controlled 52% of the production. Af- ter the war, the aluminum industry was essentially reshaped through the sale of DPC assets, allow- ing new competitors to enter the sheet business. Newly formed Kaiser Alumi- num bought DPC’s Trentwood plant in Spokane, Washington, and Reynolds Metals Company bought DPC’s Chica- go-McCook plant in Illinois. Both were capable producers of aluminum sheet, as they were facilities built by Alcoa for DPC. Alcan got a similar deal for anoth- er key wartime sheet production facili- ty when it bought the Kingston Works in Ontario, which came with a first-class research laboratory. In 1949, after hav- ing been forced to divest itself of much of its wartime capacity, Alcoa invested in new facilities in Davenport, Iowa. Fig. 2 — Passenger car curb weight trends by nameplate (standard class). Courtesy of EPA Report #460/3-73-006a, Pas- senger Car Weight Trend Analysis, Vol. 1, Executive Summary, January 1974. Fig. 3 — U.S. crude oil production and imports. Courtesy of U.S. Energy Information Administration.