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While Henry Ford and his team were planning for his new car, he attended a race in Florida where he examined the wreckage of a French race car. He observed that it was made of a different kind of steel and the car parts were lighter than those he had been previously seen. He learned that this new steel was a vanadium alloy and that it had almost three times the tensile strength of the alloys used by his contemporary American auto makers. No one in America knew how to make vanadium steel so Ford financed and set up a steel mill.

Henry Ford was the first to use vanadium on an industrial scale, in the 1908 Model T car chassis. The only cars in the world to utilize vanadium steel over the next few years would be the French luxury cars and the Ford Model T. Ford's use of vanadium steel explains why so many Model T Fords have survived today.

Just two pounds of vanadium added to a ton of steel doubles its strength, so it is unsurprising that 80% of vanadium is used to make ferrovanadium, a steel additive. It is only recently that auto makers have discovered that adding vanadium to car bodies makes them lighter and stronger.