VW buys into BMW's carbon-fibre dream

This is the kind of innovation the west needs to stay ahead of China, which now produces 40% of the worlds steel and is a distant cost leader.

This is all well and good -- carbon fiber composite is an interesting material and there's still lots of room for manufacturing improvements to make it cost-competitive. But before we fall all over ourselves praising its greenness in terms of reducing weight, it's worth considering the whole lifetime ecological impact. The carbon and the resins that bind it are made from fossil fuels, and so will go up in price along with those commodities. The material is presently very difficult to repair and virtually impossible to recycle. With steel, every body man in the world knows how to straighten, weld, and patch damaged parts, and nearly all junk cars are scrapped and melted down to make new steel. There are "mini-mills" all over the US that melt local scrap to make products for the local market, reducing transportation costs.

Boeing has been working on techniques to re-use manufacturing scrap and patch composite aircraft, but it's a difficult problem and the reality is that at least for now, any damaged fiber-composite automobile part is going in the dump, and if new replacement parts cease to be available the whole vehicle will soon follow. So long as people buy new vehicles with "lifetime" warranties, and figure on junking them as soon as replacement body panels aren't available or cost too much for the value of the car, this "disposable body" idea might work, but in general the "greenest" vehicle on the road is the old one that was built a long time ago and that, by being kept repaired, is eliminating the need to build a brand new one from scratch.

A big part of being able to keep old vehicles going for a long time is the ability to repair body damage cheaply, and a bit of a consolation prize for having squeezed every bit of useful life out of the car is that at the end it's still worth a few hundred dollars as scrap. At present, carbon composite does away with both of these "green" features.

If the reason carbon fiber are expensive because it's labor intensive to make, wouldn't China be a perfect place to utilize it to replace steel??? Am I still missing something?

"With electric and hybrid cars lightness can be used to increase both performance and range." In fact, that observation applies to all cars, regardless of the means of propulsion. Therefore, a small 800cc diesel car could turn out to be a better proposition that a hybrid or electrical. The weight of the car and the means of propulsion are separate issues.

In the high-end bike world (i.e > $3K), everyone knows that Taiwan is the absolute leader in the technology and development of the carbon fibre. This is a very difficult material to work with and production facilities require many highly skilled workers and engineers. In fact the US DoD contracts many critical components there because they cannot be had in the US. That said, I am sure Germany could ramp up pretty quickly.

ALRIGHT! Let's get some faster cars! As for the production, considering that china is so instrumental in the production of steel already, the production of carbon fibre needs to remain in the west. If china gains too much production power, what will be left? i know this is a broad statement but the point is there. Aside from that, as D. Sherman says steel is very recyclable, carbon fibre is not. World resources are limited and recycling is almost required nowadays. So until there is a way to recycle carbon fibre, we cannot rely on this technology.

The Plaid Avenger

More than 90% of petroleum is used as transportation fuel. Much less than 10% is used for chemical feedstocks. Were we to stop wasting oil by burning it in engines, the world's reserves of petroleum and natural gas for chemical feedstocks would be to all practical purposes endless.

No, you can't re-use a thermoset polymer, but it will last much longer than steel, and you can incinerate it rather than burying it. Steel recycled in electric arc oven mini-mills is not suitable for low-weight, high strength applications like lightweight cars. Steel from mini-mills is used for low-grade applications. So to say that the steel in cars is recyclable is technically true, but there is no recycling closed loop.

Ohio, you're right that much of the steel recycled in the US is of low grade. Some is good enough to roll into structural steel and rebar, and some is only fit for man-hole covers and the like. Nevertheless, it's being used to replace something that would otherwise have to be manufactured from raw materials. It's rather like the park benches made of recycled pop bottles. Sure it's not "closed loop" in the sense of making new bottles, but "perfect" is the enemy of "good", and in these cases, re-using waste to replace something that otherwise would have to be made from new materials is definitely "good".

I'm not saying we should require cars to be made of steel just so we can melt them down for rebar and manhole covers when they're worn out, but I do think we'd do well to temper the enthusiasm about the light weight of composites with a broader view of the lifetime environmental impact of the whole vehicle. If weight was everything, we'd have been making cars of titanium for the past 50 years.

Steel is eminently recyclable; carbon fiber is not. It would create a disposal nightmare. Carbon fiber is light and strong, but it fails catastrophically, as anyone, who has had their carbon fiber bicycle forks shatter, can recount. Race cars are inspected for microcracks; passenger cars won't be.

Rather than focusing on structural material as a way to reduce energy consumption, the lower cost and higher return approach would be to reevaluate standard vehicle morphology, that is, shape.

We design and purchase vehicles based on their ultimate use. What we are ignoring in that approach is the modal, the most frequent, use. Nearly seven-eighths of the time we drive alone. On average, we use a two ton vehicle to move a 200 pound payload. We have good multi-purpose vehicles, but we have no single purpose ones, the "Modal Car."

A Modal Car would weigh less than 1,000 pounds, carry two or three passengers, have three wheels or four on a narrow track, get 100 mpg, cost half the price of a standard sedan, and be built with existing technology and materials that are recyclable. It would not require carbon fiber.

The Modal Car is designed around the needs of today's two-earner families commuting to jobs in different directions. Two Modal Cars would fit into one garage space, leaving room in the standard two car garage for a multi-purpose vehicle for those times when the Modal Car is insufficient. Total cost for the three vehicles would be the same as two standard vehicles today, but total fuel use would be much less.

Racing car designer Gordon Murray's T.25 three seat design (http://www.gordonmurraydesign.com/t25.php) is an example of a Modal Car. Although it doesn't meet the 100 mpg standard, that mark could be reached with more development work.

A carbon fiber vehicle is superior to a steel one - in every respect.

Take that, and consider that the world is becoming ever more prosperous, and the costs of manufacturing with carbon fiber are falling by more than 20% a year.

Sales of steel cars will probably grow for another decade (with production relocating further to Eastern Europe, Mexico, South Korea and China), but thereafter the steel-bashers will be in terminal decline.

The correspondent needs to make a visit to Toray carbon fibre factory in Matsuyama, Japan, to realise that the Japanese carmakers have done this couple of years ago already.

Even the Taiwanese can't produce Carbon Fibre body at a rate of 1 per 90 seconds (the current throughput at Toray).

There are a number of centers of excellence for Carbon fiber, Taiwan, Germany and New Zealand thanks to yachting(see the latest AC class catamarans). At the moment CF is produced from coal but this does not cause the same CO2 effect as burning coal as it is still a solid, not a gas. Producing CF is energy intensive but as long as the energy is renewable and the carbon remains a solid and is not burnt then the atmosphere will not suffer.

However carbon is found in all organic material. If the demand for CF grows then why not extract it from trees? This is not practical at the moment but it is early days and many companies are looking at trees that break down easier. Anyway there are lots of reason for CF(and it can be repaired-again see yachting) and it will make a big contribution to the future of manufacturing. Already it is being looked at for shipping containers. The weight savings could make a huge difference in world shipping.

Isn't glass a closed loop? I mean it still takes energy to do it and no would want a glass car (well, fibreglass as a precursor to C fibre), but I thought a glass bottle could become another glass bottle etc in perpetuity.

Key technology in utilizing Carbon fibre for cars is the speed of production: Baking fo 10 minutes is not an acceptable process for an automobile assembly. Toray was set a goal of 1 minute by Japanese car manufacturers as a condition of more widespread use of its carbon fibre car body parts.

I'm honored to join you. That Volkswagen and BMY share the technology of caben fibre is a wonderful idea for the whole world. Even though this kind of advanced material has to apply to a minority of fields, it always benifit to our environment through reducing drag and preventing from rusting. Unquestionably, VW's decision create a situation of win-win.

Mass produced carbon fiber cars will not looks anything like the Lamborghini. One continuous shell means that a single dent can render the car beyond repair. That is not something people would want for daily commute. Instead cars will be a mesh mash of materials with metal, plastic as well as carbon fiber. Imagine a car that looks slightly slicker than the current design.

D. Sherman, you're out of the loop. Carbon fiber is recyclable for lower grade plastics as well (which works out quite well for more than a few applications, and is still more durable than plastics).

"Steel is eminently recyclable; carbon fiber is not. It would create a disposal nightmare."

We can burn old carbon-fiber as fuel, just like we do with old tires and other plastics, to generate electricity.

When we (1) fashion hydrocarbons into plastics and (2) burn those plastics/hydrocarbons later, we get double the use.

Anj-insan - I can understand why manufacturers would push for a takt of one minute on the carbon fibre curing process. However this is not essential in a mass production line with an overall one minute takt. On steel body production several stages of the paint process take much longer than this. They simply cover several stations. This also applies to some processes in final assembly, windscreen fix is a good example. It is not a problem.

From marketing point of view fiber composite are adisaster. They don't errode and (almost) don't get old with time. So, it is very difficult to persuade customer to chagne a vehicle in a few years. Of course, if the consumption hapbits can be changed, it is only better for the society.
I wonder, though, if customers in developing countries, like India, don't have that "I-wonna-new-toy-again" decease. They may agree to pay for a thing which is fuel efficient and lasts for decades. And marketing dept would be happy too, because they can grow extensivley in India without need to "recycle" yesterday's buyers. So, liekly, consumption growth in developing countries helps rich guys stay ahead in technology.

Another thing with carbon fiber mass production is recycling. However long they last, at some point one has to dispose the material, which is MUCH harder to recycle, and quite hazardous in wasting.

I am also not sure how "green" the cars would turn out, since high presure-temperature manufacturing processes consume quite a lot of energy (and supply CO2). Economist have mentioned 3D printing processes a week ago, which, apparently, competative with injection molding at serial production scale. Tehcnology getting more exciting