Events, Rants 
7 Comments Great Steel Design Problems
Before I start blogging on the takeaways I got from individual presentations at the Great Designs in Steel 2010 event last week, I would first like to share some high level thoughts on the topic.
The overall theme was this: future automobile designs must be stronger for Federal safety requirements and lighter to meet CAFE demands. To meet these objectives and still use steel as the base material for the vehicle structure, sheet steel will continue to become more complex to form.
I get the safety thing. But lightening the vehicle through product design and the forthcoming super advanced high strength steels to meet CAFE standards is misguided.
Why? Because it will take longer to get a new vehicle on the road, the materials will cost more, and the dies that stamp the parts will cost 2X. From the consumers’ standpoint, they will be paying a premium for the vehicle to save pennies in fuel costs.
This whole thing is politically motivated and economically irrational.
To put this into perspective: the fuel efficiency of our vehicles is the best in the history of automobiles. And, gas is relatively cheap. People pay $50 a gallon for coffee brewed at Starbucks and only $3 a gallon for gasoline. That is nearly 17-to-1 more to get you going in the morning versus getting your car or truck going.
Let’s do some simple math. Say a vehicle that costs $24,000 and gets 25 MPG gets redesigned so it gets 50 MPG at a sticker price of $48,000. The average person drives 10,000 miles a year and keeps the vehicle for 4 years.
We are getting twice the fuel ecomony at twice the vehicle cost.
The savings in fuel is 800 gallons of gas. At $3 a gallon, we saved a whopping $2,400. In other words, to get twice the fuel economy, we had to pay 10X that for the vehicle.
Now, let’s say that cars will run on Starbucks coffee. At $50 a gallon for a white mocha, we are going to save $40,000 over 4 years.
Where is the breakeven? For the super high strength steel vehicle to be economically rational, gas would have to be $30 a gallon.
But the agenda is not about rational economics. It is about conserving fuel (at any cost) and continuing to use sheet steel for automobiles.
If the agenda is really to be eco-friendly, then we need to find a viable alternative energy source (batteries are not it) and perhaps a new material for automobile bodies.
I say, let rational economics guide the decisions.
For those that need a bandwagon to ride, start a campaign to reduce the cost of coffee. Paying $50 a gallon is ridiculous.
Gotta go now. I have to pay $1 in gas to drive 10 miles to buy a white mocha at $50 a gallon.
You mean your car DOESN’T run on White Mocha?
You hit one of my pet peeves. But how about this one, what about the conflicting design requirements of NHSTA vs the insurance industry’s low damage threshold.
Impact safety is all about energy absorption (car hits wall, car should crumple to absorb the energy and keep occupants safe) collapse the engine compartment, but leave passenger compartment intact get more stars. The insurance lobbying groups want a standard that at 15 mph the max damage to vehicle should be under $1000 (car should NOT crumple). Seems that we have opposing ideas there.
How do we deal with that? Does the car know the difference between the deformation modes? So that it decides when passenger safety is more or less important than minimizing the bill at the body shop?
Also, when will the vehicle design community stop whining about springback. If you want a stronger vehicle–one that resists undesirable deformation–then you have to expect that the parts will resist the desired deformation into the part shape. It’s a pretty easy formula:
http://kam-stampingguru.blogspot.com/2009/09/springback-101-what-is-it.html
Great points … too many political agendas at play here between federal government, steel companies, insurance companies, special interest groups, big oil …
They lose sight that gas is still relatively cheap and both the safety and fuel economy is the HIGHEST in HISTORY.
I generously doubled the fuel economy in my example and the result is still minor. The CAFE standards only give something like a 20% or 25% gain (not 100% like I blogged about).
In the end, this the die guy’s global warming paradox.
At least at the GDIS the mass savings from use of HSS is relatively Carbon neutral.
Remember how much they were flogging Aluminum a few years back? The marginal increases in Fuel Economy that are achievable required up to 10-20 years of that better fuel economy to offset the fact that aluminum is pretty bad for Carbon footprint (since Aluminum Manufacture puts out lots of CO2).
2(Al2O3) + 3C –> 4Al + 3(CO2) {over simplified, but not bad}
I always wish I was the first to think of selling Carbon offsets online to assuage peoples carbon guilt.
Agreed. This Super Steel thing troubles me … more to come on that soon.
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