New forms of steel for stronger, lighter cars | Hacker News Reader

New forms of steel for stronger, lighter cars

knowablemagazine.org

33 points88888cchhcc77 comments

Have there been any kind of promising signs for an increase in demand for smaller cars? There's so many narrow residential streets in Ireland and the UK that are borderline undriveable now with all the big wide cars on the kerbs and sticking out of driveways.

Is it the same phenomenon as people buying massive phones even if they're literally too big for their hands to easily use.

I wish I bookmarked the source, but it's a collective action problem. Bigger vehicles are safer for their occupants than smaller cars, but for every life saved by bigger cars, 12 pedestrian/cyclist/small car occupant's lives are loss.

The only practical way to solve collective action problems is through government regulation, and government regulations do not take into account bystander lives.

>government regulations do not take into account bystander lives.

In the US. In the EU pedestrian safety is accounted for in their ncap rating IIRC.

I am definitely an outlier but for me, I need those massive phones (well, their screens) since I am pretty tall and have big hands / thick fingers. Typing on smaller screen is just suffer fest due to many errors, and general usage sucks too regardless of brand (ie Apple mini 13 of my wife makes me wanna cry in 30s of using it).

In terms of Samsung's phones, Galaxy S II was tiny and bad, S 22 ultra is OK, wouldn't want anything smaller.

Cars are a different topic, but with 2 small kids, small cars are useless when transporting all of us. Very bad safety, storage too tiny and thus not usable for even weekend outdoorsy trips. Now I am not advocating for oversized US style SUVs, but some storage is required and making cars taller like crossovers or european style SUVs sucks for many reasons (high center of gravity and thus bad handling, higher consumption and maintenance costs, more permanent noise in higher speeds).

Assuming you're a decent outlier, does it make sense to you that someone with a hand that could be half the size of yours uses the same sized phone as you? Iirc Steve Jobs had a fixation that a user's thumb should be easily able to reach the entire screen without readjusting their grip and that makes a lot of sense to me.

RE: Cars, I tend to think fair enough when kids are involved (although I think they could still be a lot more compact without actually losing much space inside, Japan seems to manage with much smaller vehicles) but it feels like virtually everyone of my parents generation has bought by far the largest car they ever had now that they're retired. I've one aunt who has a car she basically has to climb into, had quite a bad fall getting out of it one time and still doesn't want to downsize because she "wouldn't feel safe" driving something smaller.

An estate/station wagon style body is great for this. Room like an SUV, handles much more like a saloon/sedan than an SUV or crossover. Used to be popular as a family car back in the 1970s, every automaker made them but there are not nearly as many choices these days.

The Subaru Outback is quite popular and is basically a station wagon. But for regulatory purposes including CAFE it is classified as a "light truck", the same as any other SUV or crossover.

A lot of this is regulatory arbitrage. The whole concept behind CAFE was idiotic from the start and recent tweaks to the rules haven't fixed the fundamental problem. If we want people to burn less fuel then just tax the fuel instead of distorting the free market by putting weird mandates on manufacturers.

The station wagons available in the 1970s had some actual "utility" in that you could use one to carry a family of 5 plus dog and cargo, and tow a boat trailer down a rough dirt road to a lake. Now newer station wagon models have sacrificed that utility in a misguided pursuit of fuel efficiency and styling so they have become useless to a lot of American consumers.

> just tax the fuel instead of distorting the free market by putting weird mandates on manufacturers.

Unfortunately this is politically impossible when you've got people like Grover Norquist who will primary anyone he thinks had a hand in raising taxes.

When you scare most of congress away from using the tool of higher taxes, what you wind up with is massive deficit spending and misguided 'carrot' incentives when the 'stick' of raised taxes is taken away.

Not very safe. Yeah, they could make it better, but then you're mostly back to a SUV anyway.

Huh? Volvos are known for their wagons and their cars are among the safest in the industry.

It’s a trade off. Some people really do prefer the larger phones even if they have trade offs for pocket ability and one handed use while standing.

How many people have actually had a chance to use a modern smaller phone in the last 5 years long enough to have any gauge of that though?

The iPhone mini bombed so there aren't really options even on the resale market outside of absurdly small secondary devices and feature phones.

People definitely prefer to buy larger phones, and that's ultimately all that really matters. Similarly I feel like a lot of car purchases could have a cycle of a person increasingly bumping up the size they're looking at because a much bigger one is only a few percentage points more.

Lots of people like what they consider mid-sized option in both categories. Certainly many of us who buy what are considered in the US mid-sized SUVs have no desire to upsize.

Just buy pants with larger pockets. Problem solved.

Not too different in many cities in the United States. There really should be a width limit on street parking in urban environments.

I'd love a smaller car if everyone had a smaller car. I don't want a smaller car when there's a pickup truck 3x the size/weight with a lift kit and a driver that's on their phone or has road rage.

The problem with the steel in cars isn't that it's too heavy, it's that in the vast majority of cars, the most important structural parts rust away into nothing after 10 or so seasons of winter driving. This is hugely wasteful not only economically, but environmentally. The car companies CAN fix this, but actively chose not to, for obvious reasons.

Once I was told by a mechanic the following: if car companies where the ones liable for fixing your car, the design would look very much different.

Car companies choose what is simple to manufacture, but eventually making it very hard to maintain. If it where not for regulation, they would give you something that has a timer for breaking. That is how little they respect their customers.

Anecdotal (but at this point one of hundreds I've come across): older car had fuel pump accessible through a little sealed hatch. In current car the same pump was integrated into the fuel tank. It went bad. Guess what? You have to remove the whole fuel tank to service it. And that entails taking the exhaust out of the way. Car companies hate you.

Do we see extreme differences in design in monopsony fleet buys, like military vehicles or the postal service?

> if car companies where the ones liable for fixing your car

Sidenote: this one of the ideas behind Ida Aukens (controversial, and I would say misunderstood) "You will own nothing and be happy": One way to make companies liable is by making them own and maintain what they produce for the entire product cycle, and you only rent these items.

Of course this needs a very healthy and competitive market with effective regulations to prevent eternal enshittification. And maybe it doesn't work when shareholder value is everything that counts.

Fortunately fuel pumps don't fail very often these days and dropping the tank is not a hard job for a mechanic. But I'll admit it's not very fun for a DIYer.

The most idiotic thing I've had to deal with so far was headlight replacement on a Subaru Outback. On the driver's side, you can't get to the headlight from the top. You have to take out the whole front wheel well liner, remove some other things, and then you can GET to the headlight, but it's way back there and you can't even SEE it. So you have to do the job blind and one-handed. I did it ONCE and hated every second of it.

Wow. Clearly wow.

My experience is that cars manufactured in the past 10 years can withstand salty rust belt winters with little or no corrosion. I'm sure metallurgy varies between manufacturers but I think you're underestimating how much practices have improved.

This is correct.

On the automotive scale, rust is a solved issue.

Nickle dip, electro deposition coatings, powder coating, salt spray testing, limited exposed welds.

GP is incorrect. Rust is not the issue for avoiding steel.

It is weight. Period. Every group at every mfg is given a weight reduction goal per model line and refresh. Vehicle network systems had a bullet point not of safer, or easier, or redundant, which it is none of those things - but low weight as you can cut a lot of copper out.

And the old aluminum truck frames rotted out even worse. It's not about the metal or really the alloy but how the surface is protected using oxide conversion, better paint, and manufacturing methods which preserve these proactive measures (e.g. dont drill holes after oxide/paint applied.)

The old '61 Mack truck I have is just plain sheet metal and has a lot of rust holes in the cab and body work. My 2001 Pathfinder had a failed strut tower in 2013 from the sheet metal rusting out (well known issue Nissan screwed people with.) Newer Chevy's and so on seem to hold up decently and I hope my '22 CR-V lasts 20 years.

I work automotive, this is the correct answer along with a more detailed post I made.

The issue with steel is weight, end of story. All alloys are constantly getting application specific versions and changes. TFA is basically worthless.

It's not obvious because new cars in 2024 don't have the problems of rust buckets from the 1970's, unless you suppose that happened by accident and not because of competition between automakers.

They have gotten better but even in the '00s rust was still a problem. I had a Ford that got so rusty I had to junk it. Still ran and drove great. Some of the cheaper Asian brands such as Kia and Nissan also still had rust problems in that era. Even Mercedes of that era (W210 chassis) were rustbuckets.

"new cars in 2024"

I don't quite follow this logic? I am talking about what happens to cars with steel frames after a decade. Of course new cars aren't rusting out, but a large percentage of the ones made in 2009-2024 most certainly are. In the midwest/northeast US at least.

I'm saying that thanks to advancements in materials science, the steel used in 1970 isn't the same as steel from 2024, and will age better.

... If you don't take care of them. It isn't a car company conspiracy, it's the unreasonable expectation that you can treat a vehicle like a microwave and just run it with no thought to maintenance or environment. Mine are going just fine after 15 year with minimal upkeep in one of the harsher winter environments. Fluid film is cheaper than a new car.

Do tell for those of us that do not have to deal with snow? What do you do?

Got it treated by Krown rustproofing before the first winter, and spot treated with Fluid Film (lanolin spray) since. If I didn't drive on gravel so often it probably wouldn't need the yearly touch up.

1) better brands are really made... better in many details. I own second BMW, anytime I had a small scratch, got me worried it will eventually rust it all, technician told me not to worry, all outer surfaces are covered in zinc under paint. Compared to cheaper cars I've seen, there are literally many more layers of paint and other stuff before it comes to actual steel (or there is aluminium ie for some Audis).

2) where I come from, in cca eastern Europe with cca harsher winters, all sane folks who value their cars get right after buying get some additional protective layer on the bottom of the car (don't know details, don't live there but its not a trivial process). Easily lasts a decade. Back home during winter there is often salt and other chemistry used on the roads so without that, it would be bad much quicker.

If you live next to sea/ocean, you are screwed though I think, salt in the air corrodes almost everything.

Automakers that build cars for Europe have to make them better. A car will not pass a typical European safety inspection if it has any significant rust. In the USA many states don't have inspections of any kind, and the ones that do are often just emissions, or maybe include a quick check that the tires and brakes are servicable.

Nonsense. Most manufacturers sell exactly the same models in both Europe and North America, with perhaps minor tweaks for things like exterior lighting. Rust is mainly caused by road salt, and salt just isn't as heavily used in most of Europe.

Europe is a big place. You'd be surprised how easy it is to bribe the safety inspectors in some countries.

Just buy a decent quality car and make sure that it is properly undersealed before you takle it anywhere where salt is used on the road. Wash it thoroughly underneath as well as on top at the end of each winter; automatic car washes here in Norway do that for you.

I mean, the alternative is aluminum, but using that means your car is effectively totaled after a collision bad enough to damage the frame. I'll take steel, thank you.

I have never heard of a car getting into a collision bad enough to bend the frame and not end up totaled.

Obvious reasons.

Looking at that diagram of all those different alloys used in modern cars, can anyone comment on how galvanic corrosion is avoided at the contact points between those that are far from each other on the galvanic chart? Do they use some material in between as a physical buffer or use the sacrificial material technique or do they just not care?

I remember reading about the preliminars of those lighter steels like a couple years ago. Hope someone from Columbus, Reynolds, Tange, Ishiwata or whoever has the resources can pick up (or is already working) on this and build stronger, lighter steel tubing. It could mean a resurgence of steel bikes in cycling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIP_steel <-the steel type in question

I want the materials that create smaller personal transport. So I can see more than a few yards again, beyond the vehicles around me.

The rest of my fantasy is about driving around headlights that don't continually blind and the possibility of owning future car with physical controls but not screens.

The Citroen Oli (corrugated cardboard honeycombs with fiberglass) and Honda Sustaina C (acrylic resin) concepts are the two most interesting I've seen with small vehicles making a use of new lighter materials. I don't think either has been marked for production yet, and if you're in North America like me, we probably won't ever see them if they do get made.

This may be a good step in the size direction (if passed):

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/nx-s1-5084276/pedestrian-prot...

I would agree. Presently, it seems like any efficiency gains just means bigger vehicles. Driving a sedan nowadays is not fun at night.

So much so. Regulators really need to get headlight aim and brightness under control.

I wish they regularly crash tested the same model car against it's older equivalent. Like a new honda civic against a 5-10y old honda civic. That would be very useful to see how safety technology has improved.

I have a 2006 miata, and I keep hearing that newer cars are now safer and that I should really think about upgrading, but it's hard to part with a paid off car that has been nothing if not reliable. It also has some sentimental value. It's the last remaining relic of my 20's

Such a crash wouldn't tell you that much, also you would need to do 50 with various angles to have a definitive winner (of course it should be new one).

What is being done are standardized crash testings, so same environment, same speed, same obstacle, different results for each model. Even that us reduced to 0-5 stars for cateogry, no finer granularity. That's as much scientific as anybody is willing to do. I still don't consider it great since slight difference could mean very different outcomes, but for some reason manufacturers are not willing to part with 500 cars with various equipment mix to test them from all angles, speed and so on.

We can see some of that in IIHS driver death rate data. Of course it's just observational data and not a controlled experiment; for example, an affluent person who buys a Mercedes-Benz E-Class is probably going to drive more carefully than a "credit criminal" who buys a Nissan Altima. But you can see some general trends from real world crashes involving a lot of different speeds and angles.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

You rock! This is very helpful, though as you point out it's difficult to separate higher death rates from the fact that certain driver types are drawn to certain cars.

One notable example:

Honda Civic 49 (29-69) 47 (28-65) 2019-20

Honda Civic hatchback 78 (26-130) 20 (0-44) 2019-20

I'd like to know what's happening with the data there that a small tweak in the model with almost no structural changes has a higher death rate. Maybe down to a lower sample (fewer sales of the hatchback) of more dangerous drivers

Well, they don't crash them into each other but there are testing programs that crash them into standard objects like concrete walls. Crashing the new model into the old won't tell you much. Vehicles generally get larger/heavier with each new model. All you would probably learn is that newer Miatas weight more than old ones. Some quick googling shows that modern Miatas are about 10% heavier than they were in the 90s, probably due to the increase to 1.8 from 1.6 liter engines.

1.8l engines were always an option.

car came out in 1989. 1.8 wasn’t an option till 1993.

I mean, I hear you, but crashing like for like is the best way to understand safety over generations. We also have to acknowledge that all cars have gotten heavier over time, and thus your 10 year old car is operating in a more hostile, less safe environment

>> all cars have gotten heavier over time

Yes but there is a specific phenomenon within individual models between years. The drive to make each iteration "better" on paper leads to added features/mass/size. Just look at what has happened to the Jeep Wrangler/TJ. It is a monster compared to even the 90s models.

Come on, no one buys a compact convertible sports car based on safety. The IIHS doesn't even bother to test the Miata. But you can check their ratings for some of the same tests across model years of different cars.

https://www.iihs.org/ratings

>no one buys a compact convertible sports car based on safety.

I mean yes, I know I'm making some compromises, but I'd still like to know exactly how much of a compromise as it is my daily driver.

My point remains the same, it would be nice if one could see how the safety has improved model for model over time.

Will stronger cars result in the continued uptick in pedestrian deaths? I’ve read that the uptick is strongly correlated with the curb weight increase from larger cars, and cars with battery drive trains. But I expect that impacts from “stronger” materials will also hurt pedestrian/cyclist safety, no?

The uptick is largely a function of car design not raw weight. The US has failed to adopt proper pedestrian safety rules and the kind of cars that are worst for pedestrians like SUVs or large trucks are far more popular in the US.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/12/07/while-other-countries...

“Stronger” generally just means “stronger for a given weight”, so manufacturers would likely reduce the final vehicle weight while maintaining the same strength (~safety), or improve strength while keeping weight the same.

The steel in a car, no matter how strong... The car remains as strong as it always was, but with new materials becomes lighter, and cheaper, and more expensive yeilding higher profits into the manufactures greedy grubby hands.

Case in point: Ford.

"The parts filling of dis car are of the finest British workanship.'

And obligatory:

Joseph Lucas: Prince of Darkness.

The cars really do not get stronger.

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