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Author's Note: The automotive business is an ideal choice to examine the dramatic impact of improved materials and manufacturing processes on an industry. Automakerstodayareabletocombinehigh-tech materials 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 automobile 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 u n its per year for each body type.2 In that same timeframe, the gasoline internal 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 lour generations later, the small block today displaces up to 6.0 liters and achieves ~400 horsepower, or roughly 65-70 horse power per liter.3 The substantial improvement in power density 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 ear for the great multitude . . . so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one,"5 and A lf red 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...