Carbon Fibre Chassis

[Edmonton]

When do you think we will see mass produced cars with carbon chassis?

[Bluebottle]

Probably not that far away- within 10 years perhaps?

[Mattracer]

Everything else has filtered down through the market. ABS, airbags, cruise control, traction control etc used to be the domain of the top end European makes and Lexus. Now they're commonplace on any price level.

[avsfan733]

im not so sure it will happen. THe cost is pretty much standardized due to costs of labor and materials. The costs of carbon and epoxy won't drop much more because of the standard costs of producing them. Simply to expensive for a normal car...then you get into the problems of repairing them and working on them as well as the difference in car they receive in a race enviroment compared to a daily driver

[Dave Brand]

Originally posted by Edmonton
When do you think we will see mass produced cars with carbon chassis?

Never. A steel panel can be pressed in seconds; welding up a steel bodyshell takes a few minutes, all done robotically. Laying up a carbon-fibre chassis would take days, involving several operatives. Then there's the curing time which would generate very high levels of work-in-progress & require vast storage areas - a bean-counter's nightmare.

[rocket]

not so, if it is done it will be done using pre-preg(matting pre injected with resin)& either a 2 part press mould or vacume bag, actuall lay up time wont take long & the part will be cured in a big oven, if they use a highly promoted resin then cure time could be as little as 1hr @60deg celcius. for mass production there would be more than made at a time, the most time consuming part would be trimming the chassis

[Dave Brand]

Originally posted by rocket
not so, if it is done it will be done using pre-preg(matting pre injected with resin)& either a 2 part press mould or vacume bag, actuall lay up time wont take long & the part will be cured in a big oven, if they use a highly promoted resin then cure time could be as little as 1hr @60deg celcius. for mass production there would be more than made at a time, the most time consuming part would be trimming the chassis

Point taken, but it's still a time-consuming, labour-intensive operation compared with steel, & the raw materials are much more expensive. Tooling costs would, I assume, be much higher than for steel as the carbon fibre component would spend longer in the die, requiring more tools & presses to achieve mass-production output levels; an hour at 60°C requires a lot of energy!

Weigh the cost of production against the benefits, if any, & it's a non-starter for anything other than the most exotic supercars.