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Ford Rolls the Dice With Breakthrough F-150 Aluminum Pickup Truck
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "USA Today reports that Ford's next F-150 pickup truck will be made mostly of aluminum, instead of steel, in a bid to save weight. It will likely either be hailed as a breakthrough product to buyers who've made F-150 the bedrock of its business or one that draws comparisons to a 'rolling beer can.' The automaker has asked Alcoa, which makes aluminum blast shields for battlefield-bound vehicles, to lend some of its military-grade metal for the automaker's display, according to people familiar with Ford's plans. Ford's sales job will be considerable: The company is eager to demonstrate the toughness of aluminum, which is lighter than steel, to pickup buyers at next month's Detroit auto show. 'This is already the most significant debut at the auto show,' says Joe Langley. 'Everybody's going to be dissecting that thing for a long time, especially since Ford will be taking such a big gamble.' As a transformative product with a potentially troublesome introduction, the new F-150 has drawn comparisons with Boeing Co.'s 787 Dreamliner — an aircraft developed under the company's commercial airplane chief at the time, Alan Mulally, who in 2006 became Ford's chief executive officer. Because of the complicated switch to aluminum from steel in the F-150's body, IHS Automotive estimates Ford will need to take about six weeks of downtime at each of its two U.S. truck plants to retool and swap out robots and machinery. Ford is apparently trying to squeeze more than 700 pounds out of its next generation of pickup trucks. Using aluminum to cut weight would help meet rising fuel economy standards in the United States, which is requiring a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025."
http://www.aluminiumleader.com/en/around/transport/cars
http://www.drivers.com/article/245/
http://www.audiworld.com/news/02/aluminum/content1.shtml
Land Rover.
One could consider buying a smaller car, and only renting when you need to haul something. For most pick-up truck owners, that gives a cheaper, more comfortable ride.
I'll note that my truck has a synthetic 'plastic' bed, it works great, and is probably as tough as a rhinoliner coated steel bed. I'm sure it saves weight/cost.
The failure mechanics of aluminum is different than steel, but it is possible for it to be stronger for the weight. As a bonus, you shouldn't have nearly the rust problems. As usual, I'd be leery of buying the first year's model.
I'm still holding out for my strong hybrid truck though.
I don't read AC A human right
Most people care more about the status symbol of the new shiney, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it used in a series of Dodge/Chevy ads. "Silverado, tough as steel" or some such.
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While other manufactures have made aluminum for vehicles for a while even this is an old story. Ford announced over a year ago that the next gen F150 was going to be aluminum. The previous announcement stated that it would add about $1500 to the cost of materials. Also this isn't ford's first time working with aluminum bodied vehicles as they have previously experimented with aluminum bodied Tauruses as well as producing aluminum bodied Jaguars.
Time to offend someone
Audi Q7, Audi Q5, Landrover Defender
Not speculation by Goldman Sachs but a little scam that they figured out how to do.
Time to offend someone
I can tell that both the designers and people who think this is a great idea don't actually use a pickup for a living. I use a pickup on a ranch, and I use it HARD so that is where I am coming from. The new pickups in the last 10 years just don't last anymore because they are making them lighter and more economical to drive, and they just can't take the abuse that workers put them through on a daily bases.
So what exactly is the mileage after this?
Audi's really known for their pickup trucks, too?
Whodathunkit, apparently Audi are playing around with the idea of building a pickup:
http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/08/audi-q7-pickup-truck-is-real-new-spy-photos.html
I think he meant cars in general, Audi has been making extensive use of aluminium in their cars for years, as have Rolls Royce, Aston Martin, Jaguar, ... Rover built an aluminium Landrover in 1948, and the American Motors Corporation did the same with their little M422 jeep back in the 50s. This is hardly news except perhaps because somebody has plucked up the courage to make a (**Grunt**) 'muscle' SUV out of Aluminium with the intention of selling it to the US public.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Of course they do. On the other hand I haven't heard of the F150 on battlefields while Land Rovers have had a lot of military use. Of course they are "for work".
Consider that Land Rover used to be owned by Ford... Ford used Jaguar and Land Rover as a testbed for new technology, for instance the Jaguar XJ got an aluminum bodyshell in 2003, while owned by Ford.
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Seeing as how rust per se is the oxidation of iron, it's a pretty safe bet that all aluminum is pretty rust-resistant.
Pedantic, yeah. But I'm an engineer.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
They didn't just have one guy say "hey, let's switch everything over to aluminum and see what happens". They had engineers work on it, they reviewed the costs, forecasted the risks and expected benefits, etc. They know what they are doing. There is little if anything left to chance on this. Most likely they did a number of aluminum prototypes and ran them around on the proving grounds with aluminum versions of existing body panels so as to not draw additional attention.
Big companies like Ford don't just do things like this on a whim, they can't afford to. The American car companies still have the black eye of their quality problems from the 80s and 90s; they are one misstep away from corporate ruin. While the F150 is still the top selling vehicle on the planet, they can't afford to take it for granted or to leave its fate to chance.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's just staggering, that this is the most popular vehicle in the USA. It's about the same size/weight as a European 8-seater minibus! And this isn't at all the biggest Ford sell, is it? I've seen things on the motorway there that are almost bus sized.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I can tell that both the designers and people who think this is a great idea don't actually use a pickup for a living. I use a pickup on a ranch, and I use it HARD so that is where I am coming from. The new pickups in the last 10 years just don't last anymore because they are making them lighter and more economical to drive, and they just can't take the abuse that workers put them through on a daily bases.
Independent studies place the F150 basically equal (depending on which metric) in durability with the Silverado 1500 and Ram 1500. If you are wearing out your trucks it might be time you look in to the 250 (or higher) series. The 150 series trucks from each of the manufacturers are designed to match their usual working demands - most people who buy them live in the city and drive them mostly on the road. The most common cargo (in this country especially) in the bed of a pickup is air.
The 150 trucks are designed mostly for the urban handyman who occasionally pulls around and launches his own fishing boat on the weekend. They're good trucks but don't try to overstate their purpose.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Lots of people know how to weld aluminum. It isn't hard at all. Joe shade-tree with a buzz welder will need to buy a TIG welder and a book.
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattro_(four-wheel-drive_system)
Audi's system delivers drive shaft energy to all 4 wheels... they aren't simply free spinning wheels.
That said, Subaru has been doing All Wheel Drive for 10 years longer than Audi. They started offering it in consumer models in 1972, while Audi didn't even introduce it to their rally cars until 1980, consumer models were a few years after that. You can still buy 2-wheel drive Audis, but all Subaru models come with AWD now, and have for almost 20 years. Both Audi Quattro ans the Subaru AWD system deliver 50:50 power distribution to front/rear (60:40 on cars with automatic), with limited slip differentials to transfer power to wheels that have traction.
They don't have locking diff, which you'd want for getting out of the bog when you're off-road, but they're great for on-road conditions, even with limited traction. I've had a Subaru of some sort for years, currently a 2011 Impreza, and it's great, especially on snow/icy roads.
Aluminum *does* corrode. In most situations the oxides form a stable protective layer, but in situations where aluminum is in contact with dissimilar metal you can get galvanic action and the less noble metal will corrode. There's also a phenomenon called stress corrosion cracking where a metal in a corrosive environment can fail catastrophically after being repeatedly exposed to stress.
So a piece of structural aluminum near a fastener in a salty environment isn't safe from corrosion failure. Naturally I'd assume Ford is on top of this, and you'd have nothing to fear from your new aluminum truck. How safe it would be after a ten or fifteen years of being driven hard over New England roads is something that I wouldn't be altogether sure of. Again I'm sure the engineers have taken this into account, engineers are fallible so we'll have to wait and see.
Steel really is an amazing material, both strong and tough. It tends to fail in benign ways (bending rather than breaking), which also contributes to the safety of a steel vehicle. When steel is damaged it is easy to repair. My wife has had a couple incidents with her car and a certain steel beam in the garage at work. When it happens we replace the passenger side doors and have our mechanic beat the door pillar back into shape with big hammer. I'm not sure an aluminum vehicle could be repaired this way.
So as a geek I'm delighted Ford is trying something new. But there are good reasons nobody's attempted this before. I'm hoping it's a brilliant success, but we won't be sure until the vehicles have been on the road for a few years.
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I really hope that Ford over designs that truck since unlike steel, aluminum has no fatigue limit. And for those of you who don't know what a fatigue limit is, with some metals, they bend under stress and when the stress is removed, return to their original shape. And if the amount of bending is under their fatigue limit, then that bending process can happen an infinite number of times and no harm is done. However, if the stress is over the fatigue limit, then eventually, the metal will crack and fail. Steel has a fatigue limit, aluminum does not.
So both materials have their advantages and disadvantages.
Steel. It corrodes fairly easily, but has a good fatigue limit. So if you keep it from rusting, it will pretty much last forever.
Aluminum, doesn't corrode, but doesn't have a fatigue limit. So eventually, it's going to fail. No matter what you do, it will eventually fail. But the length of time until it fails can be extended by minimizing flex by using more material than what is strictly needed to handle the load. Or if you don't use excess material, inspect it frequently for fatigue cracks, and if any are found, repair them. On aircraft, they do have a strict inspection schedule and frankly, a lot of the inspection process involves crack finding via dye penetrant and X-ray. Somehow, I don't think such an inspection process would be done with a Ford F150. And I worry that Ford just might not bother to overbuild that truck since doing so will make it more expensive and heavier. I instead suspect that they would design it to last maybe 5 years or so under "typical use" until the frame starts to crack. A "reasonable" service life and guaranteed obsolescence.
So...how many cans do I need to recycle to get a free truck?
Not in 1948.
That's not a scam, that's hard work by the bankers making money for their investors using perfectly legal trading methods.
They do the same thing with gasoline and other commodities. Personally, I think somebody should do a RIAA style calculation of what these manipulations cost the global economy and pass a law to extract it from the banks as tax. This type of manipulation is the dark side of "providing liquidity".
The 1948 Land Rover had an aluminium body and so has all of it's direct "descendants" up to the current Land Rover Defender.
I don't know why people here see fit to "correct" stuff they don't know about.
I wish I could get a VW pickup in the US. I had a Rabbit pickup for a couple of years, it was one of the best vehicles I've ever owned.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"Other commodities", like foodstuffs. Speculators have driven millions to the edge of starvation by raising food prices out of reach of the world's poor. A couple of years ago the price of rice tripled, even though the world's farmers had record harvests. The price rise was directly attributable to speculators, and reportedly some boast about that on their resumes.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Aluminium doesn't like to flex much and it's quite stiff, the move from a chromoly bike frame to an aluminium one left my butt hurt for weeks.
I have little faith in the American automotive manufacturers to do this correctly.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The first Land Rovers where built out of left overs from the war. England had a lot of aluminum for aircraft construction but where building few aircraft.
Steel has some real benefits for car bodies like the fact that is is more springy than aluminum, it will flex a little and bounce back it is also easier to weld and tends to be harder. It is also stronger for a given thickness.
Aluminum is much more corrosion resistant and stronger per mass.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You need to look at the difference between the cost of refining a ton of aluminum and a ton of steel.
No idea what your first line is about, I assume it's something to do with a TV program?
Yeah, the Rabbit pickup was a VW Rabbit with a pickup body and a reinforced rear suspension. IIRC the carrying capacity was pretty much identical to the Toyota Hi-Lux pickup of the same time period. It drove like a Rabbit, which means it was comfortable, responsive, and that you couldn't get it stuck no matter how hard you tried. Truck had 185,000 miles on it when I bought it, I beat the hell out of it for two years and had to replace brake pads and a wheel bearing (maybe front rotors too, don't remember). I didn't have the diesel version so didn't get the 45 mpg, but since there aren't any hills to speak of in Michigan the engine was perfectly adequate.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
There are a number of issues with the calculations here.
First, you estimate that it takes about 1 gallon of gasoline equivalent per pound of aluminum (1800 gallons for 2000 pounds). This then seems to say that the energy cost for aluminum should hover around $3.00/pound (the price of the gasoline), or maybe half that since electricity is cheaper. Maybe $1.50/pound for the energy. It currently sells for $0.75/pound on the spot market, so the energy input is somehow wrong.
Also, if a truck gets 20 miles/gallon, it burns 5000 gallons in 100k miles. If it gets 25 MPG, it burns 4000 gallons in 100k miles, so the difference seems to be about a 1000 gallon improvement in consumption, not a 200 gallon improvement. If your original arithmetic is sound, you would still end up in the hole if you burned the truck at the end, but aluminum is highly recyclable with only a tiny fraction of the original energy, so in the long run I think it comes out ahead even if the original numbers are right. However, I think that with some mis-estimate of the original energy budget, it might come out ahead even on the first pass, without considering recycling.
Aluminum land rover bodies are a mainstay in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia because they don't corrode like steel bodies. Of course they are used with toyota/denso drive lines. Nobody uses land rover engines.
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Wouldn't it be easier to remove one passenger seat?
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