We don&#;t normally see stainless steel cars but Tesla&#;s making their new Cybertruck out of stainless steel. This is another bold move from a company that likes to rip up the rulebooks. You can read all about the Cybertruck here.
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But is it actually a good idea?
Why has only one other stainless steel car been mass-produced, and that ended in bankruptcy? Will it be different for Tesla, or is the new Cybertruck a big white elephant?
An English metallurgist, Harry Brearly, was trying to improve rifle barrels just before the first world war. He found that adding chromium to steel inhibited its natural tendency to rust. This is because of a chromium-rich oxide coating that seals the metal from the elements.
But it wasn&#;t until the s that people thought of using stainless steel on cars. The Allegheny Ludlum Steel company approached Ford Motor Company with the idea of a car to help them sell more stainless steel.
Ford obliged and produced 6 unpainted Ford Model 68 Deluxes. Allegheny Ludlum loaned them out each year to their top salesmen. The cars were on the road for ten years and each one of them logged in over 200,000 miles.
The shiny bodies are still in excellent condition, of course, and have held up better than the rusting steel chassis! Why the chassis was not made from stainless steel is a mystery.
But here&#;s the first reason as to why we don&#;t see more stainless steel cars on the road. A retired Allegheny Ludlum employee revealed that when the cars were originally produced the dies were ruined by stamping out the stainless steel parts from the harder material.
So, to produce cars from stainless steel, carmakers must spend additional money. Making dies that could withstand stamping out stainless steel parts day in, day out. The Tesla Cybertruck uses cold-rolled stainless steel. And that&#;s even harder than regular stainless steel, and this makes the problem even worse.
Ford agreed to another collaboration with Allegheny Ludlum in to produce two Ford Thunderbirds. These original cars had been very shiny. But with the update, they went for a brushed finish, and I&#;m sure other motorists thanked them for it!
After the issue with dies with the cars. Ford waited until the end of the car&#;s production run before damaging the dies producing the stainless steel cars! Again, Allegheny Ludlum used it to help publicize stainless steel and they toured the USA drumming up business.
The new cars used stainless steel exhausts and mufflers. They must be the only s cars still around today with their original exhausts! Ford and Allegheny Ludlum collaborated one last time with three stainless steel Lincoln Continental convertibles.
By the s mainstream car manufacturers were dabbling with stainless steel, making small car parts such as hubcaps. GM went one step further in with the Cadillac Eldorado Brougham which featured a stainless steel roof.
They did the same to the Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. The European car Maserati made their Bora with a stainless steel roof along with stainless steel windscreen pillars. But each part was a simple shape, to make production easier.
It would take a maverick car company executive to build a whole car from stainless steel. And that person was John DeLorean. A young high-flying GM vice president who one day quit his job to start his own car company.
He decided his first, and only, car, the DMC DeLorean would be brushed stainless steel. The DeLorean Motor Company was probably the only car company without a paint shop!
Only three cars sold to customers would be anything other than plain brushed stainless steel, and those were plated with 24-carat gold!
Yes, a company mad enough to put gull-wing doors on a car decided it would be a good idea to make a car that was covered entirely in real gold!
The car&#;s finish looked a little rough up close. But it had the advantage that small scratches could be taken out with a non-metallic scouring pad. Never worry about getting your car &#;keyed&#; ever again!
However, some customers didn&#;t like the unfinished stainless steel look, so took their cars to a paint shop to get the color they wanted. GMC had a brief and turbulent history, ending in receivership and bankruptcy in . Great Scott!
But stainless steel cars had several disadvantages that have kept them from wider adoption:
It seems silly to put this as a disadvantage, but to car companies who&#;ve built their entire business around selling you a new car every five years or so, having a car that doesn&#;t decay isn&#;t that great.
There are also Government incentives that encourage customers back to car dealers every few years. With tight profit margins, many car companies rely on things like leasing agreements to stay in business, and changing that may cause the business unforeseen financial problems.
Stainless steel is more expensive than regular steel, and when margins are so tight, why add extra cost to the vehicle?
As we talked about before, stainless steel is a harder metal, which makes it harder to form the final shape for the car. It&#;s also more difficult to weld.
With a steel car, if there&#;s a dent you can use filler and paint to hide the problem With stainless steel, especially unpainted stainless steel, the only option is to try to restore it to its original shape, which is hard enough with regular steel, but harder with tougher stainless steel.
Most stainless steel cars produced weren&#;t painted at all, because let&#;s face it, they didn&#;t need to be. But to many people, choosing the color of their car is a big part of the process. There&#;s a good reason why Fords come in more than black these days!
And if you&#;re going to paint the car, then the car looks no more different from normal car bodies that were becoming much more rust-resistant by the late s. People don&#;t want to stand out, but they want to be individualistic, at least in a more subtle way.
Car companies did this by first getting better at rustproofing. Then they started galvanizing the metal, and companies like Audi started making their bodies from aluminum which doesn&#;t rust anyway, and it&#;s softer than steel so easier to form.
Aluminum welding is trickier, but over time they&#;ve found ways to master it. So, this brings us to Tesla&#;s Cybertruck. They&#;ve opted to go for an even harder form of stainless steel &#; a grade they&#;ll use on the SpaceX Starship &#; so let&#;s see how those same disadvantages stack up.
Tesla isn&#;t as affected by making a car that will last more than five years before needing to be replaced. As we mentioned before, steel car bodies don&#;t rust like they used to, and the other components of a Tesla look like they&#;ll last ten years or more. Tesla&#;s a company in expansion, so it&#;s less reliant on repeat business from its customers.
This will still impact Tesla, but they&#;ll use less metal as the stainless steel body will be used as a stressed member to make the car more rigid. And with a starting price of $40,000, it seems the added cost of stainless steel isn&#;t going to impact the final car price very much.
There&#;s a good reason the Cybertruck is all angles. Instead of bending the metal, it&#;s simply cut out and welded together. Tesla and SpaceX are learning to weld this material on an industrial scale, and like Audi with aluminum, they believe that they can solve the problem.
This one may be harder to solve. Tesla&#;s claiming the Cybertruck can withstand some major impacts, so maybe fender benders just won&#;t be a big issue. But larger repairs could be a major expense, and repair shops will need to learn a whole new set of skills.
That very strength could be an issue when the car&#;s released. Elon stated in the Cybertruck reveal that the body &#;is literally bulletproof to a nine-millimeter handgun&#;.
It&#;s likely that we start to see more exotic materials come into the mainstream, there are various alloys out there plus there&#;s carbon fiber, it&#;s been around for close to 60 years and there&#;s still no way to mass-produce the stuff for cars. But that could change soon.
The thought of a stainless steel car would appeal to almost anyone, but car manufacturers don&#;t seem to be in a hurry to make such a car. While much effort has gone into rust-proofing vehicle bodies, they still rust in the long run.
Even the cars now, namely, the Fiat 500, Mazda MX-5, and Honda 800, are all rust-like ordinary cars. So, why aren&#;t we making car bodies with stainless steel?
Stainless steel is an alloy of at least 10.5% chromium known for its rust-proof and corrosion-resistant properties. It is why your kitchen sink is likely made from stainless steel, as is most of the cutlery in your kitchen and some of the shiny buildings you see around town. Seemingly a rigid material that can withstand the rain outside, why can&#;t it be used to make car bodies? Here is why.
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Tesla shocked the world when it made the Cybertruck with a stainless-steel body. Made of rigid space-grade material, the Tesla pickup Ultra-Hard 30X Cold-Rolled stainless steel body would not only not rust but could resist blows from a sledgehammer. It has all the hallmarks of a dream car, immune to corrosion, rusting, and bumps &#; but you can&#;t get a stainless steel machine just yet.
Technology.org states you must be content with the cost if you need a stainless steel vehicle. Stainless steel is more expensive than mild steel, sometimes costing twice as much as its gentler counterpart. Also, the process of steel machining required to produce car parts of a stainless steel vehicle is complex and would increase the cost of production. This is why the DeLorean DMC-12, a prototype stainless steel automobile, only features an exoskeleton. It has a thin stainless steel layer covering a fiberglass body. The implication is that the body can&#;t be repaired &#; it would require replacement if damaged.
A stainless steel body won&#;t look great even with the finest grinding services. Take a closer look at the DMC-12; you will discover it has many tiny scratches you can&#;t just wish away. They are difficult to remove; even if you tried eliminating them, you would have more. removing them means you have to scratch or grind them away in
the process of creating even more of them.
Painting the stainless steel body may be an option but not a solution. Several DMC-12 owners decided to paint their cars, but stainless steel is rugged. The paint would peel off since this material doesn&#;t hold onto the color. The painting would also take away the bragging rights of the new car owners: how would people know the car ahead of them is made from stainless steel?
Not everyone fancies the idea of a highly durable car. You want to buy the newest car but have other equally important financial responsibilities. It would be best if you had the inspiration to get another vehicle when the current one runs out of order &#; it develops scratches, paintwork wears out, rusts, and the body breaks down. Again, not many people will see the sense of purchasing another car if the old one is still functional and appealing.
Besides, the extreme durability of stainless steel cars would drive car manufacturers&#; profitability into the ground. Automakers need to keep production lines moving and keep selling their products. A vehicle whose body is not likely to break down any time soon would not be good news to manufacturers. Only precision grinding businesses would have their profits shoot through the roof as their services would be in high demand.
It is also tricky to work with stainless steel. Stainless steel requires top-notch grinding services, such as precision and machining. These processes take time to complete. Hence, parts may not be available soon enough as needed by car manufacturers. It is also difficult to weld and manipulate, taking much time to fix. What is more, a car whose body is 100% stainless steel would be too heavy. The actual structure of the DMC-12 is fiberglass with a thin coating of stainless steel.
If the only reason to go for a stainless steel car is rust-proofing, the high cost would be a deal breaker. Cheaper anti-corrosion methods are available to make your car last longer without corrosion. Modern ways of galvanizing car bodies are so effective that they outlast some of their mechanical and electronic components.
One common type of steel used in the automotive industry is mild steel. These steels have a ferrite microstructure and, hence, are easy to form. They were the most superior materials for car bodies but are now limited stiffness-related components requiring complex drawing and bending. They may have a lower strength but have a higher formability.
Another type of steel in car production is high-strength steel. Their primary strengthening mechanism is solid-solution hardening. This process makes the steel softer by ejecting carbon, making the resulting material more formable for the press shop. After this process, they become the High Strength Low Alloy (HSLA) steels which are strengthened by adding a microalloying metal such as titanium and niobium.
High-strength steels have been in use since the s and are still being used in the manufacturing of many vehicles. They make body closures and energy-absorbing areas since they absorb more energy than mild steels.
A stainless steel car is still a pipe dream considering the complications such a car would raise. It would be too costly, heavy, and would require a long time to make. Such a car would also be highly long-lasting, dipping the profitability of automakers. Since it would develop many scratches, such a vehicle would not be visually appealing. Considering that cheaper methods of rust-proofing vehicle bodies are available, making a stainless steel vehicle would not make much sense.
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