1930s all-aluminum Duesenberg automobiles

Used to make the point that aluminum cars existed long before mass-market aluminum vehicles. JP Morgan's all-aluminum Pierce Arrow is mentioned in the same breath.

Now you can say, well, what about aluminum in automobiles? They've been making all-aluminum Audis for twenty years. They made an all-aluminum Duesenberg in the 1930s, or a Pierce Arrow — there's a picture I have of JP Morgan standing next to his all-aluminum Pierce Arrow. But those were not consumer cars like a Model T. The Ford Taurus is still made out of steel. You can buy a $90,000 Audi, all made out of aluminum. And you're going to soon be able to buy a Ford F-150 that's not all aluminum — not the frame rails, they're still steel — but the body is going to be aluminum. They haven't announced the price. This summer they'll announce it.

Cited as proof that all-aluminum vehicles are technically feasible at luxury cost — used to set up the contrast with mass-market Taurus economics.

First of all, do you know how long it takes to design a new automobile? The new car that comes out tomorrow, they started designing it three to five years before. It takes two years to buy the dies and have them machined for the stamping of the sheet metal. I used to tell people, anyone could build a $40,000 Audi — because that's what they cost back twenty years ago, now they're $80,000 or $100,000 — anybody could build a $40,000 vehicle out of aluminum. We built an all-aluminum Duesenberg in the 1930s. But no one's going to build a half-million-vehicle-per-year Taurus, which was sort of the Toyota Camry of 1990 — the largest selling vehicle in the country back then. Joel Clark had a student who went on to become an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. Her doctoral thesis was to compare the cost of an all-aluminum body-in-white with an all-steel body-in-white. A body-in-white is just the metal structure without any paint, without anything else on it, just the metal unibody construction. In early 1990s dollars, the cost of a Ford Taurus was $15,000 to $20,000. Guess what the cost of the steel unibody frame was? $500. The all-aluminum was about $1,000.

Brief mention as evidence that all-aluminum automobiles are not a new idea — used to undermine the 1990s prediction that steel would disappear from cars.

Yes, you can buy an all-aluminum Audi. We had all-aluminum Duesenbergs in the 1930s. But you wouldn't buy a Ford Taurus for twenty thousand dollars if it was made out of aluminum. It would be a forty-thousand-dollar Ford Taurus. Professor Clark had students doing doctoral theses on substitution of aluminum, making a Ford Taurus out of aluminum, and concluded it would only cost five hundred more. I said, what about fabricability? She had to go back and rewrite a page in her thesis. And she still didn't get the point. There are reasons why cars and ships and railroads are made out of steel and airplanes are made out of aluminum. We'll go through that in a little bit.

People talk about — the Navy wants to build aluminum ships, right? Guess what, they're going to be more expensive, even though aluminum's lighter, okay. And people talk about all-aluminum automobiles. I used to give a talk back in the early 1990s when people were talking about all-aluminum vehicles. I said, what's the big deal about an all-aluminum vehicle? Mellon — I can't remember Mellon's first name, but of Mellon Bank — he helped fund Alcoa. The two of them in Pittsburgh kind of rose to great wealth. In fact it's Carnegie Mellon University. Well, Mellon had an all-aluminum Pierce Arrow in the 1930s because he sort of funded the whole aluminum industry at the time. So why not drive an aluminum car? We had all-aluminum Duesenbergs in the 1930s. It's not new technology to make an all-aluminum car.

In the early 90s I used to say we didn't know how to build an all-aluminum vehicle — we had the Duesenbergs and JP Morgan's Pierce-Arrow in the 1930s, but these were very expensive vehicles. We didn't know how to build a twenty-five-thousand-dollar Ford Taurus in aluminum that would sell for $25,000. We still don't know how to build a thirty-thousand-dollar F-150, but we do know how to build a 35,000-dollar F-150. We brought the fabrication cost down. They amortized a lot of the design and engineering over the largest vehicle production volume in the world. Plus to a certain extent they're hoping to keep their market share, and they may have taken a hit to a certain extent.

Used to make the point that all-aluminum automotive bodies have been attempted for 80 years.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that our ability to join a material limits the usefulness of the material. [Tom holds up two pieces of aluminum sheet metal.] Here are a couple of pieces of aluminum sheet metal that came out of the automotive research labs — this one at Chrysler, this one at Ford. These people have been trying to build all-aluminum vehicles for 80 years. We built an all-aluminum Duesenberg in the 1930s. And Mellon, of Mellon Bank — I can't remember his first name — was one of the richest men in the United States. He was on the board of Alcoa, and he had this luxury vehicle made out of all aluminum, but only he could afford it.