Aluminum Cars

I've seen the ads on TV for the Cadillac Escalade, and I have seen them on the street, and I am appalled. They are nothing more than a Chevy Suburban gussied up with chrome, fake fur and gold plating. Here was an opportunity for Cadillac to build something special, and instead it looks like they turned over the design to a salesman.

If they had wanted to make something special they might have thought about making the body and frame out of aluminum. Cut the weight in half, make the ponderous beast manageable, give it a get-up-and-scoot motation to revival some of the hot rods out there.

Or maybe not.

I was looking at a Car & Driver magazine today and they had the results of a long term test on a $100,000 Audi S-8. They had a fender bender with it early on. Cost $30,000 and took five months to get it fixed. They did prang it pretty good, but nobody was hurt and they were able to drive away, but it was leaking coolant.

Seems the body (and frame, which are all one) is made of aluminum, and there is only one shop in all of Michigan that is "certified" to repair aluminum Audis. (Seems that there is only one shop in all of Oregon as well.) Seems there is some kind of contamination issue when you are working with aluminum. You don't want any bits of iron to get in any of the welds, so they have a separate room, and separate set of tools just for working on aluminum cars. At least that's the way I understand it.

It's okay to bolt aluminum and steel parts together, you might get some electrolysis problems with that, but the real danger is in getting iron dust in an aluminum weld. So maybe that's why we don't have aluminum Cadillacs, or any other kind of popular aluminum car.