For those not as clueless as KiddingNoOne or Ed Huntress here are the facts of what's happening with carbon-fiber use in the automotive business. Expe ct to see major breakthroughs in carbon-fiber manufacture continue rapidly that will reduce it's high labor cost:
"Until recently, however, there was no way that cars with everyday price ta gs could contain substantial amounts of carbon fiber. Electric vehicles in particular would benefit, as the weight reduction would translate into long er driving distances on each battery charge.
That is how BMW ended up plunging far deeper into the lightweight materials world than executives might have expected a decade ago when the company st arted making carbon-fiber roof panels for the high performance M3 CSL. Now BMW is not only producing carbon-fiber body structures for the passenger ce ll of the i3 E.V. ? first shown as a design study in 2011 and due to be p resented to the media in Germany this week ? but it will manufacture the basic material itself. This is something of a throwback to Ford making its own steel in the Model T days."
"The car?s carbon upper frame is formed using a process called resin tran sfer molding. Multiple layers of the flexible carbon-fiber textile are plac ed into molds by robots. Resin and catalyst are injected under pressure, fo llowed by a period of heat and pressure; the pieces harden into rigid struc tures in minutes.
Next, the carbon parts are joined to one another, and to metal parts used i n some of the assemblies, by an adhesive bonding process. The showers of sp arks and unrelenting din of a traditional steel bodymaking operation, which relies on thousands of robotic welds, are eliminated.
Even though the carbon-fiber material is still much more expensive than ste el, differences in the overall bodymaking process yield cost savings that h elp to offset the cost. For starters, the i3 body structure uses just 130 c arbon-fiber pieces, compared with about 400 for a steel body. The smaller n umber is partly explained by the ability of engineers to design very comple x parts for the molding process that would not be feasible with the huge st amping presses and dies used to make steel parts. Often a single complex ca rbon part can replace four or five metal parts that would be welded togethe r.
?We can produce an i3 in about 20 hours, versus about 40 hours for a 3 Se ries car and using just one-half the space needed for a steel body shop,? said Daniel Schaefer, who oversaw development of the i3 production process ."