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When BMW takes the wraps off the new Rolls-Royce in January, the car is sure to be hailed as another triumph of engineering – as one of the biggest and most expensive cars on the road should be.

But under the four immaculate coats of paint, the car is also the latest success for the aluminium industry. The monster body of the Roller is all aluminium, marking the latest shift by luxury carmakers away from steel.

Audi, part of Volkswagen, was the earliest carmaker to adopt aluminium on a large scale, with its A8 being the latest model to use a body made from the lightweight material. Jaguar’s top-of-the-range XJ, which goes on sale next year, also has an aluminium shell.

Mike Beasley, managing, director of Jaguar, says the body shell is 40 per cent lighter and 60 per cent stiffer than steel – but it also costs more. “It is more expensive, certainly. But if you were going to get weight benefits of the amount we have achieved, the amounts you would have to spend in other areas of the car would have been even more expensive.”

However, aluminium producers are backing away from their hopes of the past few years that aluminium would rapidly replace steel in the body of mass-market cars. The extra cost of the lighter metal means steel remains the standard for cheap cars.

“We do not see the big future of aluminium in the all-aluminium car,” says Kurt Wolfensberger, president of Alcan Automotive, the division of the aluminium group. “We see the future of the car industry being the multi-material approach, with both steel and aluminium.”

Certainly, aluminium is starting to make a dent in the dominance of steel, even for mass-market vehicles, with the volume of the metal used in the average US car up 9 per cent to 125kg in the past three years. The growth is driven by one factor: weight. Unlike the luxury carmakers, mass-market vehicle designers cannot afford the cost of replacing the entire frame of a car with aluminium. Instead, they are concentrating on key areas, with engine blocks, suspension, bumpers and hoods taking the lead.

Weight reduction is important to improve the way a car handles, with the front, where the heavy engine usually sits, the key. But lightening the load the engine has to pull is becoming more important as governments, especially in Europe and Japan, concentrate on vehicle emissions. The lighter a car, the less fuel it will use, and, therefore, will be more environmentally- friendly.

The lid of the boot and bonnet are particularly popular parts to replace with aluminium in order to make them lighter and so easier to open. But Wolfgang Ruch, head of the aluminium centre at Audi, says they were also good for engineers worried about changes to the production process.

“It is a very safe way of introducing aluminium,” he says. “If you have a hang-on part, the risk of the new technology is lower because, in the worst case, you could replace it with a steel part.”

The proponents of aluminium say it is no more difficult to work with than steel. But it requires completely different procedures, meaning staff, engineers and designers all need to be retrained and factories retooled.

The experience needed to make these changes efficiently is well illustrated by Audi. Its first aluminium car, the A8, was introduced in 1994. The replacement A8, which started production this year, has 20 per cent fewer parts on the frame, thanks to manufacturing improvements. Better precision engineering means more automation is possible, with robots now responsible for 80 per cent of the work, up from 25 per cent on the old model.

As carmakers consider the cost and time needed to switch to aluminium, new materials that could knock it off its perch as the light-weight material of choice are already starting to appear.

Composite materials, including carbon fiber and advanced plastics, and magnesium alloys are already being used in racing cars, where new technologies tend to be adopted first. With dramatically lower weight, if the costs can be brought down and mass production processes developed, these could be even better for carmakers – one day.

“Aluminium will probably plateau some time in the next decade,” says William Haupricht, associate partner at Ducker Research. “But it could be 2030 before it starts to decline.”

However, there is one property of steel which can never be replaced: its magnetism, Audi has developed special steel fitting to replace a sunroof in aluminium models used as undercover police cars – so magnetic flashing lights can be attached.

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