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New forms of steel for stronger, lighter cars
Automakers are tweaking production processes to create a slew of new steels with just the right properties, allowing them to build cars that are both safer and more fuel-efficient
These approaches are yielding new ways to tune steel to protect soft human bodies when vehicles crash into each other, as they inevitably do — while curbing car weights to reduce their deleterious impact on the planet. The new steels, dozens of varieties and counting, combined with lightweight polymers and carbon fiber-spun interiors and underbodies, hark back to the heady days at the start of the last century when, he says, “Detroit was Silicon Valley.” In response, over the past 60 years, like chefs operating a sous vide machine to produce the perfect bite, steelmakers — their cookers arc furnaces reaching thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, with robots doing the cooking — have created a vast variety of steels to match every need.
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