Ford knows
exactly what they're doing.
Insurance and repair costs aren't that big a factor to the new car buyer, especially the idiots buying overpriced POSs that they don't need (full size trucks). Looking at it from supply, manufacturing or marketing perspectives, it's genius even in the short term and it's setting Ford up for longer term success as well.
A quick Googling gets some good info from
Car and Driver and
Forbes.
Car and Driver:
Quote:
By pre-sorting the scraps into containers of like materials, the analyst predicts Ford will earn $1.20 per pound... if the company didn’t separate the four grades of aluminum, it would earn only $.80 per pound. The analyst’s report goes on to estimate a return of $80 million per year for the company, more than enough to offset the alleged $60 million price tag put on the recycling equipment.
While Ford declined to comment on these findings, it’s worth noting that CEO Allan Mulally arrived at Ford after a 35-year career at Boeing Aircraft, a company whose business is largely built on the intelligent and efficient use of aluminum. With a CV like that, it should come as no surprise that Ford would be the first to market an aluminum-intensive mass-market vehicle.
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Forbes:
Quote:
Novelis, the world’s largest aluminum recycler, showed Ford how it could afford the switch to higher-priced aluminum... Together they created an innovative supply chain that allows Ford to recover a big chunk of its aluminum costs by selling the scrap back to its suppliers and reusing it.
Here’s how it works: When a vehicle body panel is stamped, about 40% of the metal winds up as scrap. Instead of gathering up all the various metal scraps from its stamping plants in Dearborn, Mich. and Buffalo, N.Y., Ford installed $60 million worth of elaborate pneumatic scrap-handling equipment that will separate the aluminum alloy scraps on conveyors and deposit them in dedicated containers to avoid contamination by other grades of metal.
The loose, shredded scrap is received in bulk dump trucks at the Novelis plant... The pieces are then melted in a 2,000-degree furnace... and it is cast into massive 30,000-pound ingots for subsequent processing. It’s then ready to be rolled into sheets one-sixteenth of an inch thick and shipped in giant coils back to Ford’s stamping plants, where the process begins anew.
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They're inventing new efficiency in making the truck, and the truck they're making is 700 pounds lighter than the one without aluminum, with all the cascading efficiency benefits that brings. They're ahead of the entire industry on this- and that's before people buy into it's being a "green" truck.