Metals: The Perils of Lulu

"We are taking the gloves off," Wilfred MacDonnell, president of Great Lakes Steel Corp., told a Detroit press conference last week. Aides stepped forward with six aluminum auto bumpers, methodically proceeded to mutilate them by dipping them in corrosive baths, firing shotgun blasts into them, twisting and turning them into shapeless forms. Next, the same treatment was applied to six steel bumpers—which somehow managed to survive. Steel and aluminum are warring over the nation's largest metal market: the U.S. auto industry.

Alarmed by aluminum's steady encroachments into Detroit—the average 1961 auto has 62.8 lbs. of aluminum v. 56.1 lbs. in...

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