A study by the University of Aachen and the European Aluminium Association has concluded that using aluminum in some car parts (as above) could safely reduce vehicle body weight by up to 40 percent, resulting in approximately a 10 percent reduction in overall fuel consumption.
Those clever boffins claim that the weight reduction potential of high-strength steel is limited to a 11 percent because nearly 40 percent of the 26 parts analyzed could not be made any thinner without severely compromising the vehicle’s structural integrity. However, it was found that aluminum could be used to slash weight without reducing the vehicle’s stiffness or hampering its performance.
Click here (pdf) for the full study “Stiffness Relevance and Strength Relevance in Crash of Car Body Components.”
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Thanks and source Autoblog Green
