During the MPC or LTI eras, were the bodys extruded in the Michigan factory? If not where? When did Lionel start making all aluminum passenger cars in China...and then mixing them with USA made locos in PWC sets?
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I can't definitively answer your questions, but...
In my pre-retirement life I had several opportunities to interact with the metal extrusion industry. Just an opinion, mind you, but I would seriously doubt that the basic body extrusions were under Lionel's roof. The machine investment, maintenance, processes, materials handling for continuous extrusion of aluminum is not trivial in either expense, know-how, space, etc..
Rather, I believe the basic extrusions would've been purchased from a supplier specializing in this technology. Cutting the continuous extrusion into lengths, punching out windows/vestibule/roof/skirt features, forming boat tail observation curvatures, etc., may have been within the scope of Lionel's vertical integration of processes. But even those steps may now be the domain of a separate specializing entity in the China scheme of thins. After all, WBB is a not-insignificant player in that line of product...maybe far more so than Lionel.
Others more knowledgeable of Lionel's various pre-China processing arrangements I'm sure will step into this discussion.
FWIW, always...
KD
As far as PWC
I do know the Canadian Pacific set had the engines made here and the cars made in China---and that was pretty early in the PWC series
Not sure beyond that
Joe S 
The aluminum passenger car bodies were always extruded and cut-to-length by an outside supplier. As KD mentions above, it's a specialized process best left to those who do it full time.
Lionel performed the piercing and forming operations for the various body styles and window arrangements.
The cars were US-made up until 1996. That year, the Chesapeake & Ohio sets (both 4-packs and 2-packs) were the last to be produced in the US, and then production moved to China for the Atlantic Coast Line and postwar-inspired Lionel Lines set later that year. For some reason, an additional quantity of the C&O 2-packs was produced in China, making it one of the very few Lionel items produced in both places.
The Northern Pacific and Santa Fe Surfliner sets were produced in China in 1997, before the tooling was repatriated later that year to produce the New York Central 4-pack and then the Great Northern 2-pack in 1998.
After an aborted attempt to make the Erie Lackawanna passenger cars stateside in 1999, all the aluminum passenger car tooling was shipped back to China, where all 1999 production and everything since has been produced.
There were some single-unit cars produced over this time, but they follow the general guidelines above.
TRW
