Excerpt from economictimes.indiatimes.com
An acrid smell hangs in the air at Trenton Forging Co. on the outskirts of Detroit as a 4,500 pound hammer slams a bar of red hot steel with enough force to shake the building.
A worker uses tongs to position the piece, heated to 2,200 degrees, under the hammer, then onto a conveyor belt. The process is repeated 7,000 times a day at the 90-employee plant, resulting in fuel rails that feed gasoline to injectors.
But the days of forging fuel rails is numbered. They’re among hundreds of parts in internal combustion engines that won’t be needed when the country transitions to electric vehicles, a fact that isn’t lost on Dane Moxlow, the vice president of Trenton Forging, whose grandfather started the business in 1967.
“This might go away completely,” Moxlow, 33, said as a pair of workers behind him inspected a freshly made rail. “Is it something we worry about? Yeah. But it’s also something we plan for.”
Across the country, thousands of companies such as Trenton Forging are warily eyeing a future of electric vehicles that contain a fraction of the parts of their gasoline-powered counterparts and require less servicing and no fossil fuels or corn-based ethanol. It’s a transition that will be felt well .