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      06-18-2012, 09:19 AM   #45
mkoesel
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Quote:
Originally Posted by swamp2 View Post
Ball is in your court here. Traditional layered, oriented woven or long fiber materials are very expensive. Both components are expensive, the CF itself as well as the labor. BMW is obviously attacking both fronts but the savings will occur incrementally. Reducing the existing cost of material by half is a huge deal.
We are on the same page here swamp. BMW will continue to bring carbon fiber more and more into mainstream automotive applications, however it will occur slowly in an evolutionary fashion, with the F80 M3 being one of the first products to attack areas of the car other than body panels. This is a first go, and they are not going to go from an all-steel body shell and mostly-steel-and-aluminum chassis to something that is predominantly carbon fiber, or even appreciably so.

As compared to traditional materials such as aluminum and steel, I still do suspect that materials costs are only a small consideration when weighed against fabrication and engineering costs. Hypothetically, what if we wanted to build a carbon fiber Hot Wheels car today? Let's say it cost $5 to produce where the current die-cast metal car might cost $1. In my mind, materials cost would account for perhaps $1 in the increase while R&D, manufacturing would account for the other $3. That's a silly example with some major SWAGs, but you can hopefully see what I am trying to say here.
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