Aluminum: Ford and Jaguar's Love Child - Automobile
Surely, that has been the case with Ford and Jaguar-Land Rover. We dwell on Ford’s inability to understand European luxury and Jaguar’s inability to make money. For Jaguar and Ford, that child was aluminum. When Ford bought Jaguar in 1989, neither automaker had much expertise with the material. ’” recalls Mark White, who joined Jaguar in 1986 and is now the automaker’s chief technical specialist for lightweight vehicle structures. Jaguar had in its misty past crafted aluminum racing cars such as the Lightweight E-Types , but these were exotic, largely hand-built affairs. Starting in the mid ’90s, Jaguar and Ford engineers worked on ways to scale up aluminum production. Jaguar Land Rover and Ford slowly but surely worked through aluminum’s challenges with technologies such as self-piercing rivets and more complex castings that reduce the number of parts that need to be joined and thereby the number and variety of... The aluminum Ford and Jaguar developed together will prove vital to each company’s independent survival. Neither Jaguar sedans nor Ford F-150s are traditionally very efficient. And neither Jaguar buyers nor F-150 buyers seem likely to embrace electric powertrains or significant downsizing. Source: www.automobilemag.com
