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Feb 17, 2014

TECHNO TRUCKS * USA: Ford / GM / Chrysler

* Michigan - The unbearable lightness of trucks

(Photo: The Hummer loses 900 pounds of metal body panels and parts, which are then replaced with parts fabricated of fiberglass, balsa wood, foam, and carbon, with resin as a bonding agent)
Detroit,MICH,USA -The Wellington Times (New Zealand), by Rick Conroy -February 14th, 2014: -- It’s a big deal. It’s been the bestselling truck in Canada for more than 40 years, bringing in over 40 per cent of the company’s Canadian sales volume, and it accounts for about $30 billion in annual corporate worldwide revenue. It’s the Ford F-150. And it’s changing, big time... Ford announced during last month’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit that henceforward the F-150 will be recast with a body of aluminum rather than of steel. It will make the truck about 318 kilograms lighter, and thereby help Ford meet new fuel economy standards, which require a doubling of 2011 levels by 2025... Ford’s biggest competitors are obviously GM and Chrysler, so I checked in with them first... And “what’s the competition going to do?”... It turns out that GM is about to take the wraps off a truck whose body will be made entirely of balsa wood.... Chrysler is equally upbeat. Its solution is to go with styrofoam—a material that is more that 30 per cent lighter than aluminum... And how are the Japanese responding? It’s not clear yet, but one rumour has it that Toyota is looking at an extruded material similar to Play-Doh...

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