Automakers creating new steels to make safer, more fuel-efficient cars

Innovative steel advancements in auto manufacturing improve safety, fuel efficiency, and environmental impact, revolutionizing the industry.

Like many useful innovations, it seems, the creation of high-quality steel by Indian metallurgists more than two thousand years ago may have been a happy confluence of clever workmanship and luck.

Firing chunks of iron with charcoal in a special clay container produced something completely new, which the Indians called wootz. Roman armies were soon wielding wootz steel swords to terrify and subdue the wild, hairy tribes of ancient Europe.

Twenty-four centuries later, automakers are relying on electric arc furnaces, hot stamping machines and quenching and partitioning processes that the ancients could never have imagined. 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.

“It is a revolution,” says Alan Taub, a University of Michigan engineering professor with many years in the industry. 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.”

Such materials can reduce the weight of a vehicle by hundreds of pounds — and every pound of excess weight that is shed saves roughly $3 in fuel costs over the lifetime of the car, so the economics are hard to deny. The new maxim, Taub says, is “the right material in the right place.”

The transition to battery-powered vehicles underscores the importance of these new materials. Electric vehicles may not belch pollution, but they are heavy — the Volvo XC40 Recharge, for example, is 33% heavier than the gas version (and would be heavier still if the steel surrounding passengers were as bulky as it used to be). Heavy can be dangerous.

“Safety, especially when it comes to new transportation policies and new technologies, cannot be overlooked,” Jennifer Homendy, chief of the National Transportation Safety Board, told the Transportation Research Board in 2023. Plus, reducing the weight of an electric vehicle by 10% delivers roughly 14% improvement in range.