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On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.

In the 1960s, as the consumer-product world we now live in was booming, the Harvard economist Raymond Vernon laid out his theory of the life cycle of these products,

Amana, for instance, introduced the first countertop microwave—the Radarange, made in Amana, Iowa—in 1967, priced at $495. Today you can buy a microwave at Walmart for $49 (the equivalent of a $7 price tag on a 1967 microwave)—and almost all the ones you’ll see there, a variety of brands and models, will have been shipped in from someplace where hourly wages have historically been measured in cents rather than dollars.

Even as recently as 2000, a typical Chinese factory worker made 52 cents an hour.

chief executive of Severstal North America, the United States subsidiary of Russia’s Severstal Group, which now owns the Rouge steel operations.

At Severstal’s Dearborn factory, for example, carmakers including Ford and others account for 70 percent of sales,

The shift to aluminum is gaining momentum. Automakers are under increasing pressure to meet strict new fuel-economy standards by 2025

United States Steel has invested $400 million in a joint venture with Kobe Steel of Japan to make advanced high-strength steel in a Leipsic, Ohio, factory expected to produce 500,000 tons annually.

Inside Severstal’s steel mill on a cold January day, hissing heavy machinery removed oxides from steel sheets, reducing their thickness to the equivalent of five human hairs.

For nearly a century, Ford’s River Rouge factory and its neighboring steel mill have worked in close harmony

new federal fuel-efficiency standards that will require a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, a significant boost from the roughly 25 m.p.g. that vehicles average today.

“Sometimes there is a push from the aluminum side, and they win over with a particular model, and steel tends to be the comeback kid, with more innovation,” said Felix Schuler, a Munich-based partner in the Boston Consulting Group’s metals and mining practice.

What seems certain is that ordinary steel is likelier to lose out to its new and improved cousin than to aluminum, Mr. Schuler said.

Novelis is investing nearly $550 million to upgrade plants in Oswego, N.Y., and Nachterstedt, Germany, and to build a new factory in Changzhou, China, to triple its capacity from a year ago to 900,000 tons annually.

Alcoa, the country’s biggest aluminum producer, is investing about $670 million in its Iowa, Tennessee and Saudi Arabia facilities.Continue reading the main story

“Henry Ford was a control freak, and he wanted to control as much of the manufacturing as possible,” Mr. Casey said. “He made the steel, he made the glass, he made the tires.”