Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
The Evolution of Technology for
Materials Processing over the Last
50 Years: The Automotive Example
Alan I. Taub, Paul E. Krajewski, Alan A. Luo, and John N. Owens
Author’s Note: The automotive business is an ideal
choice to examine the dramatic impact of improved
materials and manufacturing processes on an industry.
Automakers today are able to combine high-tech materi-
als originally applied in aerospace and other industries
with the high-volume manufacture of a mass-marketed
consumer product. This paper will detail how many of
the changes to vehicles that have resulted from these
influences over the past 50 years have been enabled by
significant advances in materials and processes.
THE FIRST 50 YEARS
The basic elements of the automobile
had matured substantially by the middle
of the twentieth century—the first motor
car was patented by Karl Benz in 1886
and the basic principle of the automo-
bile manufacturing process, the moving
assembly line, was first put into practice
in 1913.1
By the 1950s, vehicle engineering and
manufacturing processes had developed
to the point where annual freshening of
body styles was possible even with the
requirement of efficiently ramping up
new models to hundreds of thousands of
units per year for each body type.2 In that
same timeframe, the gasoline internal
Figure 1. Key auto industry drivers and technology enablers. (CAD = computer-aided
design; CAM = computer-aided manufacturing; CAE = computer-aided engineering;
BFI = body frame integral; BOF = body on frame.
48
combustion engine had also advanced
significantly. General Motors (GM), in
fact, introduced the first overhead valve,
high-compression eight-cylinder (V8)
engine in the 1953 Buick Roadmaster and
the small-block V8 in a 1955 Chevrolet.
That first small block displaced just 4.3
liters and produced up to 195 horsepower,
or 45 horsepower per liter. Ninety million
engines and four generations later, the
small block today displaces up to 6.0
liters and achieves ~400 horsepower, or
roughly 65–70 horsepower per liter.3 The
substantial improvement in power den-
sity is even more impressive when one
considers that smog-forming emissions
(hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides) have
been reduced by more than 99 percent
at the same time.4
The large economies of scale available
to the industry made vehicles affordable
to growing numbers of people. Henry
Ford designed the Model T to be “a
motor car for the great multitude . . . so
low in price that no man making a good
salary will be unable to own one,”5 and
Overview
1957 2007
Alfred Sloan stated that “the ideal toward
which (GM) is striving is to have ‘a car
for every purse and purpose’ and to make
every car represent maximum value to
the purchaser at its respective price.”6
By 1955, the cost to buy a baseline
Chevrolet Bel Air ($1,725) represented
just 20 weeks of U.S. wages.7 Afford-
ability promoted personal mobility and
by the mid-1950s, the North American
auto industry was producing almost 10
million units per year (compared to 14.6
million units today).8 The trend has con-
tinued—despite dramatically increased
vehicle content, it takes only 24 weeks
of a U.S. median family income to pur-
chase a vehicle today.9 Global vehicle
ownership has grown even more impres-
sively—the industry produced just over
13.5 million units in 1950 compared to
almost 66 million units today.10 In 1950,
there were less than 60 million vehicles
on the planet and only two percent of
the world’s population were vehicle
owners. Today, the global vehicles in use
stand at 800 million, which translates to
approximately 12 percent of the world’s
population owning automobiles.11
INDUSTRY CHALLENGES IN
PAST 50 YEARS
Beginning in the 1960s, the auto
industry has had to deal with a number
of significant “externalities” that have
driven discontinuous changes in the
automobile. These external pressures
have included emissions concerns,
issues related to energy consumption
and availability, vehicle safety, and, more
recently, growing consumer demand for
more personalized products. Many of
the changes to our vehicles that resulted
from these key influences have been
enabled by advances in materials and
manufacturing processes (Figure 1).
At the start of the 1950s, design and
JOM • February 2007
performance were the key differentia-
tors of the product in the marketplace. Body-
High Volume
This worked well for the industry until Frame
High Investment
Integral
the mid-1960s, when Ralph Nader and Installed Base
Car
other consumer advocates began to
Isolated Engine
draw increased attention to automobile GM EV1
Cradles
safety.12 With the heightened focus on Acura NSX Ford AIV &
safety, new features like energy-absorb- Jaguar XJ Isolated Engine &
Honda Insight
ing systems, structures, and materials Oldsmobile
Rear Suspension
Audi A2 Cradles
were introduced into the vehicle to Aurora
protect occupants in the event of a crash. Low Volume Audi A8
High Volume
High Investment
These changes resulted in more demand- Low Investment BMW Z8 Installed Base
Greenfield
ing vehicle requirements and increased Ferrari Modena 360
Truck/SUV
engineering complexity.
Space Opel Speedster Body-on-
Following close on the heels of the Frame Frame
calls for enhanced safety, the Organiza- Chrysler
Prowler
tion of Petroleum Exporting Countries
oil crises of 1973 and 1979 drove oil Figure 2. This schematic shows body architectures enabled by different materials
and gasoline prices sharply higher and and manufacturing processes.
the industry needed to increase vehicle
fuel economy. One important avenue
for improving vehicle efficiency, and
thus fuel economy, is mass reduction.
For a mid-sized family car weighing
1,450 kg, it takes a 45-kg reduction in
mass to achieve a 0.6 miles-per-gallon
improvement in fuel economy.13
To more easily reduce vehicle weight,
the industry moved cars from the body-
on-frame (BOF) architecture to the more
weight-efficient body-frame-integral
(BFI) architecture. With the BFI architec-
ture, all body panels contribute to vehicle
stiffness and performance. At the same Figure 3. The material and manufacturing process evolution in front cradle
time, lightweight materials began to be structure.
substituted for the low-carbon steel that
dominated the vehicle structure. With
this new architecture and additional engi-
neering safety requirements, it became
more difficult to make major styling
changes and, therefore, it began to take
longer to refresh vehicle designs.
With today’s more fragmented auto-
motive market, major body architectures
are now suited for a wide range of Figure 4. Advanced simulation for high-pressure die casting (magnesium cradle for
vehicles—from low-volume sports cars Corvette Z06).20
to high-volume BFI passenger cars and
BOF trucks—requiring many different
materials and manufacturing processes
(Figure 2). While many cars have BFI
structures today, trucks continue to main-
tain the BOF architecture because this
structure is ideally suited to their load
and towing requirements as well as the
proliferation of body styles in this seg-
ment of the marketplace. In fact, there are
many factors that are used to determine
Figure 5. The material and manufacturing process evolution in an instrument panel
the best body architecture for a vehicle beam structure.
platform. The range of architectures that

2007 February • JOM 49

has been used on aluminum-intensive
vehicles, for example, is due to the fact
that aluminum is highly amenable to
alternate manufacturing processes, as
will be discussed in a following section
of this paper.
In the 1990s, the era of “global hyper-
competition” dawned. The growth of
the global industry as well as a greater
number of major global manufacturers
led to more models being offered in each
market and, inevitably, to dramatically
fewer units per model compared to the
much high numbers produced in earlier
decades. In the United States and Europe,
for example, the industry is rapidly
approaching 400 entries, up from under
300 in the mid-1990s—a 25 percent
increase in ten years. In China, the shift
is even more striking, with the number
of entries forecast to quadruple to over
250 entries by 2010. With more entries,
sales per entry are trending downward
in the more mature markets like the
United States and Europe, moving from
above 50,000 in 1995 to closer to 45,000
units today. And while sales per entry
are on the rise in the emerging markets,
reflecting rapid growth in these areas,
the only developing country where sales
are expected to top 40,000 per entry by
2010 is China.14
The combination of more complex
engineering requirements and a highly
competitive marketplace has driven the
need for more efficient and faster vehicle
engineering tools. With the exponential
increase in computing power over the
past 20 years, there has been a virtual
explosion in computer-aided design
(CAD) and engineering tools within the
industry. As a result, today’s product
development process depends much
more heavily on virtual prototyping
using math-based simulation rather than
on testing of physical hardware. The
industry has been able to significantly
reduce the lead time required to develop
its new products and powertrains through
application of math-based design,
engineering, prototyping, and tooling
development. Many manufacturers today
also employ reusable design templates to
automate design and engineering tasks,
further speeding development.15
The proliferation of models has also
led to dramatic changes to automobile
factories—particularly with respect to
flexibility and automation. One major
50
enabler has been the introduction of
robotics into the plant. Today, a typical
assembly plant body shop will have
500–600 robots, mainly used for joining
(i.e., spot welding), but also for moving
material into place. The paint shop will
have another 30–40 robots, and the rest
of the plant will have some additional
robots for material handling or dis-
pensing.16 More recently, we are seeing
flexible fixturing, such as GM’s C-Flex
programmable body shop tooling, which
allows multiple vehicle body styles to be
welded with the same robots.17
To summarize the key forces impact-
ing automobiles: The pressure to improve
fuel economy is driving weight efficiency
and greater use of lightweight materi-
als. The decreasing number of units per
model is driving investment efficiency
and faster factory product turnover.
This paper will review how these
forces have been met over the past 50
years with new materials and processes.
Since the vehicle is a complex integra-
tion of a number of subsystems, each of
which has been transformed in response
to the change drivers noted previously,
we will focus on structural materials,
concentrating on chassis, interior, and
body applications.
AUTOMOTIVE STRUCTURES
Chassis Applications
Lightweight and efficient chassis
structures are important to several key
performance attributes including ride,
handling, and noise and vibration control.
Figure 3 shows how, over the decades,
new aluminum/magnesium alloys and
their manufacturing technologies have
enabled reduced mass and improved
performance and productivity in the front
cradle structure.
The first all-wrought aluminum cradle
was introduced by GM in the 1999 Chevy
Impala. It consisted of 15 extruded sec-
tions and two stampings and weighed 18
kg; in comparison, a typical steel sheet
construction has about 48 parts weigh-
ing 28 kg. Advanced robotic aluminum
welding technology (i.e., pulsed-gas
metal arc welding) was used to join the
complex extrusions and this occurred
along a welding line of 40 robotic weld-
ers in four weld cells.18
Additional developments include thin-
wall and hollow aluminum casting tech-
nology, which have made the aluminum
cradle design more efficient and greatly
reduced welding requirements. A good
example is the hollow casting/extrusion
welded cradle for the next-generation
Cadillac CTS, which will start production
in July 2007. The method used to produce
the thin-wall (4 mm) hollow casting for
this cradle is a modified low-pressure
permanent mold process (vacuum riser-
less casting/pressure riserless casting) in
which a steel mold is bottom-fed from a
crucible. The vacuum pulls gases from
the mold and begins the fill. Pressure
is then added to fill the cavity and feed
shrinkage, producing extremely sound
castings with very low porosity levels
(<0.5 percent) and good weldability.
This process can be fully automated for
high-volume production.19
Another significant process develop-
ment is high-pressure die casting, which
offers attractive flexibility in design and
manufacturing. With the excellent die
filling characteristics of magnesium and
aluminum alloys, this process allows
large, thin-wall, and complex light-metal
castings to be economically produced,
enabling the replacement of steel struc-
tures made of numerous stampings and
weldments. Despite high productivity (a
typical cycle time of about one minute),
the biggest drawback to the conventional
high-pressure die casting process is the
porosity that results from entrapped gases
as a result of injecting the molten metal
at high velocity into the die cavity. The
porosity issue is less serious for thin-wall
sections (<2.5 mm) where the mechani-
cal properties are largely provided by the
fine-grained and pore-free skins.
When thicker walls are needed for
stiffness and/or durability in chassis and
body applications, the effect of porosity
on mechanical properties (especially
ductility and fatigue strength) becomes
more significant. Vacuum die casting is
characterized by the use of a controlled
vacuum to extract gases from the die
cavities, runner system, and shot sleeve
during processing. This technology
stretches the capabilities of conventional
die casting while preserving its economic
benefits. The first-in-industry one-piece
magnesium die-cast cradle for the 2006
Chevrolet Corvette Z06 weighs only 10.5
kg, a 35 percent mass savings over the
aluminum cradle it replaced. As shown
in Figure 4, advanced simulation of
JOM • February 2007
die fill and solidification has proven to
be a useful tool in guiding design and
process control for large and small die
castings.
Interior Applications
The instrument panel (IP) beam is the
most important interior structural part. As
shown in Figure 5, a traditional sheet steel
design of ten years ago consisted of about
30 parts.21 In 1996, GM introduced the
world’s largest magnesium die casting,
a one-piece full IP beam for the GMC
Savana and Chevrolet Express vans.
In addition to mass reduction (12.3 kg
in magnesium versus 18.2 kg in sheet
steel), the magnesium IP design pro-
vided performance improvements such
as enhanced crashworthiness, reduced
vibration, and cost savings due to parts
consolidation. More efficient magnesium
IP designs in recent GM models have
achieved even greater mass savings and
part consolidation, such as a 5.8-kg beam
casting for a GM mid-size car.
The use of magnesium in IP beams,
however, is currently facing strong
competition. Instrument panel designs
using steel tubes are only slightly heavier
than magnesium die castings but can
be significantly less expensive. Tubular
designs in magnesium are also being
explored for future IP development. A
hybrid IP design using a magnesium
tube over-molded with die castings is 55
percent lighter than a steel tubular design
and 30 percent lighter than a one-piece
magnesium die-casting design with
equivalent stiffness.22
Body Applications
Over the last 50 years, passenger car
body structures have moved from all
mild-steel sheet construction to mixed
materials (Figure 6)—a transition that
also has been enabled by advanced manu-
facturing technologies. In the1990s, the
development of aluminum vacuum die
casting, extrusion, and welding/joining
technologies—along with the creation
of special cast aluminum alloys such as
AURAL-2 and Magsimal 59—were key
enablers for aluminum-intensive vehicles
like the Audi A8/A2, Acura NSX, and
Jaguar XJ.
Over the same timeframe, the steel
industry has made significant advances
in steel alloys. Many advanced high-
strength steel grades were developed
2007 February • JOM
for automotive applications, including
high-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steel,
dual-phase steel (a mixture of primarily
soft ferrite and hard martensite, possibly
with some bainite), and transformation-
induced plasticity steel with very high
tensile strength (600 MPa) and elongation
(36 percent). In many cases, these steels
offer only slightly less mass reduction
compared to aluminum but at a fraction
of the cost. Advanced high-strength
steel has made significant inroads, with
application in many light vehicles such as
the BMW 7-Series and Lexus LS430.
GM’s Epsilon body structure, shown
in Figure 6, is a high-volume global
architecture represented by the Chevrolet
Malibu in North America. Introduced in
2003, this was the first GM vehicle that
made extensive use of advanced high-
strength steels. The body structure used
in GM’s current midsize cars (Malibu,
Pontiac G6, and the new Saturn Aura)
includes five percent HSLA and 12 per-
cent dual-phase steels. It is expected that
the body structure for future-generation
midsize cars will contain 35 percent dual-
phase and 8 percent martensitic steels.
Sheet Aluminum in Closures
Vehicle closure panels such as hoods,
doors, decklids, and fenders have typi-
cally been made from cold-rolled steel
sheet, which has excellent strength and
formability. These characteristics, in
combination with relatively low cost,
make this material very amenable to
high-volume stamping.
While steel is pervasive in vehicle
closures, the use of lightweight sheet alu-
minum has been increasing over the past
30 years. Aluminum closures provide
35–50 percent mass reduction compared
to similar steel closures. However, unlike
the cast aluminum applications described
in the previous sections, the penetration
of sheet aluminum has not been as wide-
spread because the raw material is two to
three times more costly than steel and it
also has significantly lower formability. A
complex part like a door or liftgate inner
panel has to be redesigned or made from a
multi-piece assembly because aluminum
cannot be conventionally stamped into
intricate shapes.
Despite these challenges, sheet alumi-
num has a long history in the automobile
industry. The 1909 Model T Touring Car
was made with aluminum body panels,
and aluminum hoods were commonly
used in many Model Ts (Figure 7).23
Many closure panels were made with
aluminum sheet in this time period, using
1xxx or 3xxx series alloys, which have
good formability but low strength. The
common theme in these early automo-
tive applications was low-volume, niche
products that were labor intensive and
emphasized craftsmanship.
As automotive volumes increased after
World War I, steel became the material of
choice in the automobile industry. Steel
sheet was used almost exclusively until
the oil crises of the mid-1970s drove
automakers to explore decreased mass as
a method for improving fuel economy.
Aluminum sheet began to be reintroduced
in the late 1970s, primarily for hoods
since their relatively simple design could
easily accommodate aluminum stamp-
ing. There were many applications for
a few years, but the industry switched
back to steel for economic reasons by
the mid-1980s.26 In the 1990s, the use of
aluminum sheet for closures, especially
hoods, increased again. This shift was
spurred by the number of aluminum-
intensive vehicles being developed across
the industry.
The growth in aluminum sheet applica-
tions over the past 30 years has largely
been enabled by manufacturing improve-
ments rather than material improve-
ments. In fact, the common automotive
aluminum sheet materials—AA6111,
AA5754, AA5182, and AA5083—have
existed since 1982, 1970, 1967, and 1954,
respectively.27 Most of the manufacturing
improvements have been in conventional
stamping. Since the characteristics of
aluminum are different from those of
steel, the stamping industry had a steep
learning curve in areas such as finite-ele-
ment modeling, die design, formability
analysis, part handling, lubrication, die
coating, die maintenance, and scrap
segregation.
Although these improvements have
facilitated aluminum usage, the funda-
mentally lower formability of aluminum
compared to steel remains a challenge.
To address this issue, alternate forming
processes continue to be investigated.
These include superplastic forming,28
quick plastic forming (QPF),29 hydro-
forming,30 thermohydroforming,31 warm
forming,32 roller hemming,33 retrogres-
sion heat treatment,34 electromagnetic
51

Figure 6. The material and manufacturing evolution in automotive body structure.
forming,35 and preform annealing.36
As examples of these technologies,
QPF and roller hemming each address
different formability problems and pro-
vide solutions that are enabled by simula-
tion and robotics technology. In the case
of QPF, the technology was developed to
take advantage of the enhanced plasticity
of certain aluminum alloys at elevated
temperatures. The technology for roller
hemming was originally developed as a
method to reduce tooling investment and
provide increased manufacturing flex-
ibility; however, it ended up providing
an advantage with aluminum because it
modified the strain path and improved
formability.
Quick Plastic Forming
The phenomenon of superplasticity, in
which fine-grained or dual-phase materi-
als exhibit extremely high ductility due to
grain boundary sliding, has been known
since the famous work of Backofen over
40 years ago.37 Superplastic forming
(SPF), which uses gas pressure to form
superplastic alloys into single-sided dies,
has been used extensively in the aero-
space market to make a variety of com-
ponents for spacecraft and commercial
airplanes.38 Since the 1970s, it has also
been used by the automotive industry to
produce complex, lightweight panels for
niche products with annual volumes of
less than 1,000 units. An example of the
SPF process, where panels are manually
extracted from large heated presses, is
shown in Figure 8. The technology has
been optimized around niche vehicles
where tooling costs are extremely low,
cycle times are long, labor content and
52
material price are high, and parts can be
reworked after production because each
vehicle is handcrafted.
Quick plastic forming was developed
by GM as a hot blow-forming technol-
ogy that adapted the SPF process to the
mainstream automotive industry. It has
been implemented to produce liftgates
for the Chevrolet Malibu Maxx and
decklids for the Cadillac STS. The goal
of QPF technology development was
to create a process that would enable
dimensionally accurate automotive parts,
manufactured at automotive volumes for
a competitive price. The requirement
for dimensionally accurate parts neces-
a b
Figure 7. (a) A 1909 Ford
Model T Touring Car with
aluminum closure panels.24
Photo courtesy of B. McCalley,
Model T Ford Club of America.
(b) Aluminum hood from 1915
Model T.25
Figure 8. A photograph of the
superplastic forming process
with manual part extraction.
(Photo courtesy of Superform
Aluminum, USA)
sitated the development of improved
part release mechanisms, a new seal-
bead geometry, and, most importantly, a
fully automated process.39 A photograph
showing the automated part handling
system is shown in Figure 9.
A key enabler for automating the
QPF process was the development of the
integrally heated tool, which eliminated
the need for a special heated press. The
heated tool allowed the use of conven-
tional material handling equipment and
also prevented heat loss during multiple
press cycles. The requirement for dimen-
sionally accurate parts also resulted in
a lower forming temperature (450°C
compared to >500°C). Decreasing the
temperature gave the panel more strength
and made it less susceptible to damage
or distortion during handling.
Automotive parts are generally not
as complex as aerospace parts. Thus,
while improved formability was required
compared to conventional stamping,
the formability did not have to meet
traditional SPF levels of up to 1,000
percent. This led to the development of
math-based tools such as PAMQPF, a
finite-element modeling code that could
predict the formability required to make
the desired components.40
To manufacture parts at automotive
volumes, the process also had to have the
ability to produce up to 100,000 panels
JOM • February 2007

per year. This required that cycle times
be reduced from ~30 minutes per part to
2–3 minutes per part, which meant that
the material needed to be deformed at
strain rates of 0.001–0.01 per second.
This is at least ten times faster than
SPF materials were typically deformed,
meaning forming limits and deformation
behavior needed to be re-evaluated.41
Finally, the requirement for lower cost
drove the development of an improved
material for the QPF process. This
involved formulating a lower-cost ver-
b Figure 11. (a) The hydroform-
Figure 10. (a) An example of a typical
roller hemming operation with a robotic
arm and (b) a photograph of the bending
deformation that occurs during roller
hemming. (Photographs by Hirotec
America).
2007 February • JOM
Figure 9. A photograph of the
GM QPF process showing
automated part removal and
handling.
sion of AA5083 that was able to tolerate
a higher impurity level (e.g., iron). The
commercial-purity AA5083 materials
developed for QPF provided almost all
of the formability of the high-purity
materials but were cost-competitive with
commercial aluminum sheet materials.
Roller Hemming
A significant formability challenge
for aluminum in vehicle closure appli-
cations is the ability to hem the outer
panel around the inner panel (requiring
a 180-degree bend) to produce a tight,
crack-free assembly. The quality of the
hem on a closure panel is very important
to the appearance of the vehicle since it
defines the fit between body panels. In the
automotive industry, this has been termed
the “jewel effect.” Because aluminum
is typically up-gaged compared to steel
and has lower formability, the radius at
the edge of the hem is larger than is typi-
cal for steel, thus giving a less desirable
appearance. Improving the hem situation
in aluminum has been addressed by a
variety of methods, including increas-
ing the hem radius (rope hem), using a
down-standing flange instead of a hem,
ing of aluminum frame rails for
the Chevrolet Corvette Z06.
(b) Hydroformed high-strength
steel frame for Chevrolet
SSR.
b
using lower-strength 6xxx series alloys,
and applying localized retrogression heat
treatment.42 While each of these tech-
niques has demonstrated improvement in
hemming, they all have drawbacks that
have prevented their widespread use.
Roller hemming uses a rotating tool
on the end of a robot arm to provide the
mechanical deformation associated with
hemming (Figure 10). This represents a
significant change from the traditional
methods. Hemming was originally a
manual operation where the inner and
outer panels were located in a fixture
and the hem was formed by hammering
the flange from the outer panel over. As
volumes increased, mechanical hem-
ming was performed first in a press,
then with smaller “table-top” units
with complex cam systems to bend
and flatten the flange into a hem. These
processes were expensive, requiring
dedicated tooling and presses for each
application. With roller hemming, only
a simple clamping fixture is needed
for each assembly, enabling decreased
investment and increased flexibility. The
robot can be programmed to follow any
desired path and thus the roller hemming
cell can be used for a variety of closure
panels. This becomes more advantageous
as the number of model variants for a
particular vehicle increases, effectively
reducing the volume requirements for
specific closures. The evolution to roller
hemming over the past 20 years has very
positively impacted hemming force,
investment, and plant floor space.
While not originally developed for
aluminum, the strain path used in roller
hemming actually is more favorable
53

Figure 12.The composite panels of a 1953
Chevrolet Corvette.
Figure 13. Hand spraying of fiberglass
preform.
for aluminum, creating a less severe
condition and allowing a flat hem to be
produced.39 The rolling motion of the
process moves the strain path away from
pure plane strain, which is the worst con-
dition for formability. This effectively
decreases the amount of strain at the
surface of the bend, thereby allowing
more forming before fracture occurs.
Recent work has shown that aluminum
alloys that exhibit cracking during con-
ventional hemming operations do not
exhibit cracking during roller hemming.
As a result, this technology has recently
seen increased usage in aluminum appli-
cations, such as the Audi A8.41 It likely
will be a critical enabler for the use of
aluminum in future vehicle closures.
HYDROFORMED
STRUCTURES
Tube hydroforming is a metal-form-
ing process that uses pressurized fluids
such as water to make various perimeter
shapes from tubes. Compared to stamp-
ings, hydroformed tubes provide further
mass savings for structural components.
They are used today for many structural
applications, including frame rails,
54
engine cradles, radiator supports, and
IP beams.43,44
As shown in Figure 11a, a tube
hydroforming process was a key
enabling manufacturing technology for
the Corvette Z06 aluminum frame. The
Corvette’s 4.8 m frame rail is the largest
hydroformed aluminum part in the world.
The hydroformed roof bow and IP beam
also are very complex tubular structures
that consolidated many stamped parts for
significant mass savings and stiffness
improvements.
The Chevrolet SSR, a low-volume
sport truck, features full-length hydro-
formed rails similar to the Corvette
frame, but this time made from steel
(Figure 11b). A traditional stamped
frame with equivalent strength and rigid-
ity would weigh roughly 20 percent more
than the hydroformed structure. This
improved strength allows the frame to
take on the road inputs and allows the
suspension to do its job more precisely,
resulting in better ride quality.
GM’s truck programs also make exten-
sive use of tube hydroforming to produce
steel truck frames. The technology,
which is highly automated, has improved
quality and manufacturing efficiency.
The GMT800 truck frame, introduced
in 1999, was the first high-volume
application of hydroformed front rails
and cross-members. The hydroformed
frame doubled the torsional stiffness
compared to a conventional stamped
truck frame while achieving a 15 percent
weight savings and better ride quality.
The hydroformed frames are further
improved in GM’s newly introduced
GMT900 trucks, which have an annual
production run of 1.3 million units.
LIGHTWEIGHT POLYMER
COMPOSITE MATERIALS
Although automakers have been
making composite-intensive prototype
120
100 
Mass (Millions of kg)
80
60



40






20



0 0
1970 1975
and low-volume niche vehicles for
decades, broader application of poly-
mer composites has been thought to be
too expensive or not suitable for high-
volume manufacturing. Of the myriad
combinations of polymer type (thermoset
or thermoplastic) and forming process
(injection molding, compression mold-
ing, liquid molding, thermoforming,
etc.), the greatest inroads have been made
in compression-molded thermosets.
Compression-molded thermosets or
fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP) applica-
tions have more than a 50-year history in
the automotive industry. Most automo-
tive historians credit the 1953 Corvette
as a landmark example because it was
the first widespread application of FRP
in a production automobile.45 When
introduced to the public at the Motorama
Show at the New York Waldorf Hotel, the
Corvette show car sported a body almost
entirely made of composites (Figure 12).
The choice of FRP for the show model
was based on expediency; the original
production plans called for steel panels
formed from kirksite tooling.46
However, the concept of an FRP
sports car captured the imagination of
the American public and demand for the
car caused Chevrolet to scour the FRP
industry for capable molding processes.
Although the open mold processes
developed in the boat-building industry
were evaluated, they were found to be
too slow. Nevertheless, beginning in
June 1953, 300 Corvettes were produced
with FRP body panels made in open
molds by hand rolling polyester resin
into glass-fiber mats. In the meantime,
a faster, more productive process was
under development to meet the expected
demand.
The chosen process was Molded Fiber
Glass’s (MFG) matched metal die mold-
ing, which was capable of making up to
100 parts per day in a single tool. For
300

— SMC Production

250
— SMC Cycle Time

Cycle Time (s)



200















150





100 Figure 14. The cycle time

  and production of automo-
50
tive sheet molding com-
pound (SMC).
1980 1985 1990 1995 2000
Year
JOM • February 2007

Figure 15. An SMC press retrofitted with
secondary hydraulic leveling system.
simple shaped parts, preforms were made
from fiberglass mats; for more compli-
cated or deep-draw parts, preforms were
prepared by hand-spraying chopped
fiberglass strands onto a shaped screen
(Figure 13). The molding was accom-
plished by placing the fiberglass preform
into the tool, hand spreading a measured
quantity of polyester resin onto the per-
form, then closing the mold. After a
three-minute cure, the molded part could
be pulled from the tool and deflashed
with a hand-held electric sander.
Over the next decade, the fundamen-
tal process remained unchanged,
although impressive productivity and
quality improvements were made. Robert
Morrison, MFG’s chief executive officer,
estimated that between 1953 and 1963
processing costs for the Corvette body
panels were reduced by 50 percent.47 A
large fraction of these productivity gains
came as a result of improved efficiencies
in the preform fabrication, which allowed
the process to become less labor-inten-
sive. Stronger hydraulic presses with
improved controls were also cited as
contributing factors.
Despite these productivity gains, the
surface quality of the preform-based
molded parts was inconsistent and often
required significant hand finishing prior
to painting. Inconsistencies in the
manually sprayed preforms were blamed
for many of the surface flaws. The com-
posites industry took two different
approaches to these surface quality
problems. One approach was to develop
a low-shrink resin system that would be
less prone to surface waviness and crack-
2007 February • JOM
ing. The second approach was to develop
a pre-impregnated flowable mat system
to replace the preform process.48,49 This
pre-impregnated mat material eventually
evolved into what is now called sheet
molding compound (SMC). As early as
1968, these two approaches coalesced
into a low-shrink SMC that was intro-
duced into production in truck cabs by
International Harvester.50
Both approaches were used by the
Corvette program in the early 1970s.51
In 1971, a low-profile additive for reduced
shrinkage was included in the polyester
resin used in the preform process for all
of the outer surface panels while SMC
was implemented in a few parts with
shapes difficult to preform. Over the next
few years, Corvette panels were increas-
ingly switched from the preform process
to SMC. This changeover was due to
continuous improvements to the material
and process. With the improved consis-
tency of SMC, the surface quality
improved and the labor required for hand
finishing decreased.
In the 1970s, when externalities such
as the oil crises and increasingly stringent
safety and fuel economy standards
required automakers to significantly
decrease vehicle mass, the productivity
gains achieved with SMC led many
manufacturers to turn to composites.
Automotive usage of SMC more than
doubled, from 20 million kg per year in
1970 to nearly 45 million kg per year by
the end of the decade (Figure 14).
This dramatic increase in usage would
have been even larger had SMCs not been
plagued with surface flaws such as pits
and porosity, which required hand finish-
ing prior to top-coating. In response to
this issue, in-mold coating technology
was developed in the late 1970s.52 This
technology involved injecting a coating
over the surface of the SMC while still
in the mold. The resulting improvement
in surface quality was dramatic, but a
high price was paid in the form of
extended cycle time.
The late 1970s also saw innovations
in hydraulic presses when secondary
hydraulic systems were developed to
improve platen parallelism (Figure 15).
Other press improvements included
innovative short-stroke designs that
allowed a secondary hydraulic system to
drop and lock the upper platen into posi-
tion just above the tool and a much
shorter, high-pressure stroke to be initi-
ated from the lower platen.53 In addition
to faster closing times, the lower position
of the locked upper platen increased the
effective rigidity of the press, enabling
thinner parts to be molded with improved
tolerances.54
Despite all of the improvements made
in composites processing since the first
Corvette, comparatively long cycle times
still limited SMC applications to lower-
volume vehicles heading into the 1980s.
The five-minute cycle time required in
MFG’s preform molding in 1953 had
only been reduced to three minutes for
a typical SMC molding by 1983. Between
1983 and 1988, however, a series of
process improvements were developed
to reduce cycle time (Figure 14).55
Vacuum-assisted molding was a key
technology developed for shorter cycles.
Removal of the air ahead of closing the
press allowed use of thinner, higher die-
coverage charge patterns without fear
of air entrapment and blister formation.
Thinner charges allowed for faster mold
closing times, which in turn enabled faster
chemistries that would otherwise have
led to pre-gel. Perhaps even more sig-
nificantly, vacuum-assisted molding led
to improved surface quality and allowed
for the elimination of in-mold coating
(Figure 16). This alone accounted for a
30 percent cycle time improvement.56
In the mid-1980s, improved micro-
Figure 16. A Pontiac Fiero deck-
lid molded with vacuum assist.
55
processor controls gave SMC presses
unprecedented control of platen paral-
lelism and closing speed. These presses
generated tighter tolerances in part
thickness and therefore enabled thinner
wall sections to be molded.57 In addi-
Figure 17. The advanced materials in Chevrolet Corvette Z06.
Figure 18. GM R&D nanocomposite material applications.
Figure 19. The materials in a typical automobile—historical perspective.
56
tion to cost and mass reduction, thinner
parts also enabled shorter cycle times.
By 1988, press improvements in com-
bination with vacuum-assisted molding
enabled SMC productivity to finally meet
the elusive 60-second cycle time that
translates to better than 250,000 parts
per year from a single tool.
Automation and robotics entered
into the SMC molding process in the
mid-1980s. Automated charge cut-
ting, robotic charge placement, robotic
demolding, and automated routing/
deflashing stations were gradually
introduced into SMC plants.58 In terms
of annual SMC production per worker, in
1985 the average was 12.5 tons; by 1990,
this increased to 18 tons per worker.
Automotive applications of SMC
continued to increase through the early
1990s. A major driving force was the
lower investment levels needed for tool-
ing in SMC vs. sheet steel. While the
mass savings afforded by SMCs were
welcome, this was not the deciding factor.
In the mid-1990s, low-density formula-
tions of SMC (1.3 g/cc vs. 1.9 g/cc) were
developed by replacing mineral fillers
with glass microspheres. These materials
replaced conventional SMCs in many
structural parts but were not successfully
applied to cosmetic surfaces due to the
surface defects caused by microspheres
at the surface.
By the late 1990s, environmental
concerns drove a transition from solvent-
applied primers to powder-applied prim-
ers in many automobile paint shops. The
higher paint bake temperatures that were
required with the new primers caused an
unacceptable level of surface defects in
the available cosmetic grades of SMC. As
a result, cosmetic applications of SMCs
were eliminated from vehicles destined
for powder prime-based paint shops.
Efforts are continuing to develop a new
SMC formulation capable of withstand-
ing the higher-temperature bakes.59,60
THE FUTURE
While the changes in materials and
processes over the past 50 years have
been dramatic, the next 50 years prom-
ise to be even more exciting as rapid
advancements in materials science and
engineering enable new automotive
materials, novel vehicle designs, and
improved fabrication technologies.
The 2006 Chevrolet Corvette Z06
already contains some of these next-
generation materials. In addition to a
lightweight aluminum frame (at 129
kg, 30 percent lighter than the steel
frame it replaced), the Corvette Z06 also
uses many advanced materials such as
JOM • February 2007

a first-in-industry magnesium engine
cradle, magnesium steering column,
steering wheel, and brake module support
bracket, carbon fiber floor pan (with a
“unique in the industry” sandwich struc-
ture), front fenders and wheelhouses,
and titanium valves and connecting rods
(Figure 17). The employment of these
advanced materials, in combination with
the use of efficient hydroforming and die-
casting processes, made this vehicle the
most affordable exotic performance car
in the world (e.g., 60-mph acceleration in
3.7 seconds) and the first 500-horsepower
non-gas-guzzler in the United States.
As we look farther into the future,
we also will see expanded use of nano-
engineered and smart materials. Some of
these materials are making their way in
to vehicles today. For example, Figure
18 shows a nano-reinforced TPO com-
posite that GM is using for a number
of different part applications on several
vehicles.61,62
One trend is clear—vehicles will
consist of a more balanced use of many
materials in the future, incorporating
more lightweight materials such as
nanocomposites and aluminum and
magnesium sheet (Figure 19).63 In addi-
tion, the types of materials employed in
automobile manufacture may depend
more on materials innovations rather
than on manufacturing innovations as
a result of the dramatic advances being
made in materials science today.
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Alan I. Taub, Paul E. Krajewski, Alan A. Luo, and
John N. Owens are with General Motors Corporation
Research & Development, 30500 Mound Road,
Warren, MI 48090. A. Taub can be reached at (586)
986-4817; fax (586) 986-6347; e-mail alan.taub@
gm.com.
57