The Global Cost of Corrosion

I came here to mention E-coat, though I'm thinking of it by another name, it's why in dry climates it's rare to see vintage fords rusted out, GM and Chrysler took longer to implement it.

Porsche 944s and 928s are far more rust resistant than most American or Japanese cars of the 80s or even 90s. Likewise with Volvos. The classic 911 was an old design that went through iterative improvements, and the 964 is better rust-proofed than most American or Japanese cars of the late 80s or 90s. Old Audis tend to have minimal rust, and old Mercedes-Benzes like the W126, W124, and W201, while they certainly can and do rust, their bodies tend to far outlast Japanese and American cars of the same era driven in similar conditions. Old W124s still soldier on as daily drivers and winter beaters in the cold and salty environments of post-Soviet states with mostly OK bodies, whereas Japanese cars of the 1980s almost all rotted away beyond repair being worthwhile more than a decade ago.

Somewhere in the late 90's early 2000's car manufacturers switched paint processes, typically to a water based paint.

That's the point in time where you could see the most clearly which manufacturers had their house in order in terms of weld cleaning, seam coating, basic material procurement and surface protection.

Some of them failed horribly, which led to some brands (for instance: Mercedes) having an undisclosed hit against their earnings to deal with the resulting rust issues on relatively new cars. It wasn't rare at all to see an early 2000's C-Class in the shop for the replacement of four doors, bonnet and rear hatch. And it wasn't rare to see them completely rusted out either a few years later. From Q1 2003 they galvanized those panels and then the problem stopped.

So everybody smartened up and now things are much better, to the point that there hardly are cars made that have serious rust issues. Coatings are a continuous materials science development front and some of the stuff that happened in the last decade and a half is extremely impressive.

Car bodies used to be gone long before the engines, those days are over.

VAG, Volvo, Mercedes, BMW all have a very good reputation nowadays for being rust resistant, I would not know of a favorite between those. By the way, Volvo is now Chinese (bought by scooter manufacturer Geely).

My own car is a 1997 (just before they switched paint formulation for that particular brand) and there isn't a spot of rust on it and as far as I know it has never had body work done. (Don't get me started about engines though...)

That may well be so, Japanese cars had an absolutely terrible reputation for being rustbuckets in the 70's so they had to do something about it. Given the number of them that were manufactured the fact that they are so rare today is as far as I know uniquely due to the rust problem.

I'd say the Japanese figured out how to make this happen on a cheap car. Almost all high end european cars (including Volvos) had great rustproofing for a long time but cost far more than Japanese cars. The Japanese made the first reliable and long lasting low priced cars.

Galvanized sheetmetal with a good quality coating will last you a lifetime.

But beware of accidents, make sure all the seams are checked near the point of impact and some way back from there.

Reduce trash by retaining things for longer. :D

But you're right, IMO. Maybe it should be retain, if you can't retain try to reduce, if you can't reduce reuse, if you can't reuse recycle

Isn’t it reuse?

Reduce - don’t buy another car, reuse - keep using your car, or buy a used car, recycle - sell your old car for scrap.

I think the idea is reducing consumption and it falls under that.

And repair. Repairing always uses fewer resources than making new.

While I personally and professionally select use repairable items in lieu of non-repairable ones, I believe that this is not entirely a personal issue. Another r-word to add should be regulation. Without some degree of enforcement, the present set of incentives will continue to worsen the situation.

Refuse is funny because depending on how you pronounce it, it might not fit well.

At this point there is nothing to spray on, it all fell apart. It was already bad at the moment they did the recall 6 years ago with frames having fist sized holes. The way you could fix it was cutting the frame up and replacing with fresh metal plates piece by piece.

Interesting. Mine is a 2004 wrx and getting full of holes, but mechanic keeps assuring me drive train is solid and perfectly safe to drive.

VW is an affordable brand.

Unless you happen to think that reduced car ownership is good for the world!

I feel like that is a self-perpetuating cycle. Japanese carmakers build cars to rust out in half a decade and thus nobody wants to buy old rustbuckets thus the carmakers don't bother to build them to last.

There's a huge export market though: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_used_vehicle_export...

I read that something like 60% of cars registered in NZ are Japanese imports.

IMHO Japanese used car exports have a lot of the characteristics of "dumping" (in trade terms) but because there is no local vehicle manufacturing in most of the places they end up, nobody complains.

It's not uncommon to buy used car like newer than 10yo in Japan now. I can see many such cars at the road side used car shop. Because Japanese people especially in rural area (who need car) getting poor relatively, newer cars getting expensive thanks to safety and comfortable equipment, and reliability is improved, used cars getting more reasonable. After 13yo, vehicle tax increases so it's not popular but still sold, especially kei-cars are sold well because it's cheap for tax.

Still, according to this popular used car site, vehicle made in 2002-2011 is listed 109k, 2012-2021 is 319k so newer cars are more sold well. https://www.carsensor.net/usedcar/index.html

the mazda3 used to be terrible for rusting but they changed something in 2007, a collegue mazda3 was from 2006 and it rusted so much thast it had almost no resale value, my gf mazda3 from 2008 sill looks new...

p.s. I live in a place were salt used to be applied aggressively in the winter. Nowadays they use more sand and only use salt when the road conditions really requires it. but it's a recent development (3 years at best)

Inhibitor paper is old tech though, was already around in 1970s.

why not? it does inhibit air/moisture exposure

the magic compound in the product you've linked doesn't cover the entire surface of the part you wrap in it, and it doesn't create a perfect seal, so it functions exactly as that oiled paper I saw did

I saw some pretty intricate automotive parts preserved that way. granted, they weren't exposed to the elements, but still - pristine. shiny like factory-new

Right. I guess a replacement alloy would be the best bet. No matter how cheap your improved process is, the input costs are still there.

Or an improved process for extracting and refining chromium itself. Aside from cost, I think it’s a dirty process as well?

I have a hand cart / furniture dolly that's almost entirely plastic. The only metal bits on it are the axle and the handle. It's perfectly durable and I've used it to cart around items that weigh 600 lbs. (300kg).

It's also a good little example of where plastic is good and where it's not. The axle and the handle get the largest amount of stress, so they remain steel, while the body of the cart can be a trussed plastic mold to achieve the strength needed.

Portable gas cans are another area where plastic wins in my book. It's lighter, more impact resistant, and cheaper to mass produce. And it don't rust! Sure, there are probably niche cases where you want a metal jerry can, but for most applications a blow-molded plastic container is better even if it wasn't also cheaper.

But I still think a cheap, strong, and corrosion-resistant (or -proof!) metal would be revolutionary. For all the structural uses where plastic won't do. Vehicle frames, airframes, bridges, tooling, etc. My holy grail here is something that's basically aluminum, but without the fatigue issues. Oh, and closer to steel in cost.

beginning of the Rustocene layer

Plastic is indispensable completely unlike electricity is indispensable.

Plastic is a huge pollutant, with breakdown stats that make you cry once you start thinking in terms of tons of absolutely indestructible stuff that makes it into our environment every day. Only a very small fraction of that stuff really needed to be made from plastic. Mostly it is just done because it is cheap and mechanically well understood. And because - tadaaaa - it lasts longer than most other materials. But the result is that the plastic invariably outlasts everything else, and it is super hard to recycle it efficiently unless it was expressly made to be recycled, which it rarely is.

Electricity is a highly fungible form of energy, in every way that matters unlike plastic and for which we do not have any alternatives that come close to having the same kind of properties for everyday use.

Hmmmm...it's whatever Option+k does on macOS. I thought it was the degree sign because it doesn't actually combine, but apparently degree is option+shift+8 instead.

But right now there's a lot of places that we explicitly choose to use plastic and not wood, because it's somewhere that wood would degrade.

Wood is often protected by plastics. Acrylic wood finish and paint are plastic. Particle boards such as those in many Ikea furniture are covered with a plastic sheet.

If you don't use plastic you need to switch to solutions requiring more maintenance and offering less protection like vegetable oil or pine tar.

some people use it as an architectural element. they'll build planters, roofs, siding, fences...

> ...democracy... It's a system explicitly designed to be short-sighted.

It's not explicitly designed for that. It's designed to avoid concentration and abuse of power, peaceful transition of power, and to create some level of fairness.

Democracy wasn't designed to produce the best society or the most wealthy society.

Democracy was designed to avoid dictators/kings and other really bad things :)

That said, we often seem to think that we can optimize for something beyond the short term. It's a seductive thought. But experience with communism/central-planning, suggests that maybe it's best to optimize for the short term. At least that works, and produces results in the meantime.

It's the same with waterfall software development vs agile software development. Optimizing for the short term and iterating is usually better than to try and plan the future top-down.

IIRC, Coated rebar can actually fail faster or in less predictable and therefore worse ways. The coating is often damaged during install, but even perfectly coated bar forms cracks eventually. The entire system's galvanic potential is focused on these small exposed areas, causing extremely fast rusting. The coating tends to fail in higher stress areas, which means that not only does the bar fail, it fails in the worst possible locations.

I worked for a sailmaker in the Netherlands who also did rigging. You really get to appreciate the difference if you see saltwater exposed rigging after a year or two from slightly different steel formulations, one still pristine, the other looking as though someone is pulling a bad joke on your with rust colored paint. Also: maintenance made all the difference, people that would immediately fix a small issue were often able to arrest it without further damage. But ignore it for a while and one thing leads to another.

edit: as to your point regarding crevice corrosion: yes, that is very nasty indeed, especially because a visual inspection will typically turn up nothing out of the order, all it takes is a bit of trapped moisture and some time.

What would u use for a floating scaffolding or buoy that you want to last in sea water?

(Yes, we can tow it to shore for inspections, but would rather not)

Even stainless steel throughout objects can and do rust.

Here is a pretty good article on what goes on when the passivation layer is compromised:

https://www.alliagesunifies.com/blog/does-stainless-steel-ru...

So this isn't about 'objects coated with stainless steel' it is about objects made entirely from stainless steel. Have a look at what a typical all through stainless steel terminal on an ocean going ship looks like after a couple of years. Especially when they are made from lower grades of stainless (such as for instance 304) vs better ones. Not all stainless is made equal when it comes to corrosion resistance.

sorry I annoyed you. I thought I covered both in my post. Feels like you have to walk on egg shells around here least someone correct you.

Very interesting - I’ve always been confused by why aluminium is often stated as being rust-proof, but doesn’t appear to be as useful in the real world.

Aren’t there quite a few aluminium engine blocks in cars though? For example, the LS small block is now aluminium.

Or do you mean used in marine applications, where rust is an issue? That would probably make more sense (and may actually be implied by the context).

Plus if they put it into the ocean, the pollution will flow back to us.

How much is pushed vs pulled?Many resource extraction projects are cancelled because they wouldn't be economical with all the added costs to ameliorate pollution. Perhaps if the developing world had higher standards and better enforcement, it would cost more and thus not undercut local production.