stevea26 Posted April 19, 2010 Share Posted April 19, 2010 (edited) Total Ford NUT here. I never knew about this car til today....... AIV Edited April 19, 2010 by stevea26 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkisler Posted April 19, 2010 Share Posted April 19, 2010 Total Ford NUT here. I never knew about this car til today....... AIV Ford had a big push from the advanced engineering community on all-aluminum construction. These cars were one example, but the later examples were CDW27's (Contour). In one case, the CDW was fitted with an AWD system and the SVT V6 and it was....amazing. The lighter weight and AWD made it super throwable. But the major contribution of the aluminum Contour was to show that if one constructed a body out of aluminum by essentially changing steel to aluminum and changing the design only where necessary, then you could pretty easily have good crash performance. And, further, you could use existing computer models with minor modifications to accurately predict results. This contribution opened up the way to the Jaguar XJ which was pretty much a replication of the D2 (DEW) platform in aluminum. There were some members of the advanced community who believed that Ford would have to go to aluminum construction to save weight and meet CAFE. All-aluminum vehicles were in Ford's plans for production from time to time, but they always dropped off. It's pretty expensive (probably around $1,200 or so). The cost differential never seemed to go down, due to material costs and fabrication difficulty. Aluminum also has issues with repair. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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