All-aluminum automobile body cost analysis (early 1990s)

The broader case of which Joel Clark's student's thesis is one instance. Tom's prediction in the early 90s that mass-market all-aluminum vehicles were twenty years out.

Back in the early 90s I also had opinions about all-aluminum automobiles. People were predicting that, because of the price of gas, in five years all the cars would be all-aluminum vehicles. Audi was starting to come out with an all-aluminum vehicle. It's the same type of thing. People were talking all this great hype about the increase in the price of gas and how the aluminum vehicle was going to wipe out steel, and the steel mills were all going to fall apart, and no one would invest in the steel industry, they're totally foolish to do so. I used to say, we will not have all-aluminum vehicles for another twenty years. Everybody was just shocked, how could I say this.

Ford looked at an all-aluminum Taurus — $25,000 car becomes $35,000 car.

So the point is, if I want to sell a car for two dollars a pound, or if I want to save weight on a car and it's only worth two dollars a pound over the long run, I can't use a material that costs more than about twenty cents a pound. And that's steel. You can't afford aluminum. Back when I was developing all this stuff ten years ago we had gasoline at two dollars a gallon — now at four dollars a gallon, maybe you can afford steel. But guess what, the price of steel has gone up. It's now about forty cents a pound for the sheet steel they use in automobiles, so the numbers all still sort of work out. It does make sense if you're buying gasoline in Norway, which is probably at eight dollars a gallon — not because they don't have a lot of gas, but because the Norwegians want to conserve, it's a national policy. The only reason the world makes steel cars is because they want to sell into the North American market, and that's us. Aluminum cars make lots of sense everywhere else because the price of gasoline is higher. But everybody wants to make something that's going to be competitive with the Ford Taurus. Even Ford looked at an all-aluminum Ford Taurus years ago — instead of a $25,000 car it becomes a $35,000 car.